421
The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds, social media and other forms of informational junk food. It is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and it is beautiful.
What the hell is RSS? RSS is just a format that defines how websites can publish updates (articles, posts, episodes, and so on) in a standard feed that you can subscribe to using an RSS reader (or aggregator). Don’t worry if this sounds extremely uninteresting to you; there aren’t many people that get excited about format specifications; the beauty of RSS is in its simplicity. Any content management system or blog platform supports RSS out of the box, and often enables it by default. As a result, a large portion of the content on the internet is available to you in feeds that you can tap into. But this time, you’re in full control of what you’re receiving, and the feeds are purely reverse chronological bliss. Coincidentally, you might already be using RSS without even knowing, because the whole podcasting world runs on RSS.
I love the idea of the internet coming to us rather than us going out to the internet. And RSS is an excellent example.
I want a system that will cache articles, comics, essentially websites and stay on a system until I am ready to read it. Then it will transform into a queue (RSS clients), email, ebook/pdf format, etc…etc… and ill read it. Its easy for server admins (people are not bombarding their systems), its easy for users (get content how they want it to work) and its better for the internet as a whole. Its one of my favorite tech that has not gone away.
Ive went from google reader, to thunderbird rss, to freshrss on my own system. My phone queues it all up in the morning and in the afternoon at work, where internet is spotty, ill read my pre-downloaded articles. Its a great system.
email is pretty close to the system you mention.
Id rather subscribe to certain entities instead of having ALL entities being able to send me messages. Every time I have my own mailserver, it gets overwhelmed with spam.
But yes email as a technology is really close to perfect.
understood. 👍🏻
Yep, instead of a single address you should be able to issue keys that let people message you, and when you receive a message you should be able to see what key was used to send it.
And of course you should be able to revoke keys (tell your mail server to no longer accept messages signed with it).
freshrss doesn’t cache images. how do you do it offline?
Couple different ways.
It came with my setup script back a year or so ago but https://github.com/FreshRSS/Extensions/tree/master/xExtension-ImageProxy works. Also the caching occurs when it gets transfered over to my phone or client. The client does the heavy lifting. I dont really care after that.
I remember that extension but I didn’t user it because it didn’t cleanup after it self (old not needed images stayed in cache).
what is “your phone”? you mean an app? I know about text caching (I don’t know if frehsrss has an option to get original page for RSSs that has just a simple text that redirects to full page), but even inoreader that had that (if i remember correctly) didn’t have image caching.
TTRSS reader. It has a “cache image” button on it. I assume it works.
Ive never had any issues even outside of internet. comics come in from what I see.
it works with freshrss self hosted?
Yep doing it now! :)
tt-rss and frehsrss are two different self-hosted apps. are you sure using that app doesnt mess with freshrss?
…Im not sure what to tell you. freshrss has an API that TTRSS-Reader works on the backend with. And its working. Fresh ALSO has its own frontend that can work.
In preferences theres an “connection” area. Otehr than showing you a lot of screenshots im not sure what else to say. GL!