posted in Selfhosted

gedaliyah@gedaliyah@lemmy.world

Why do people host RSS?

I see a lot of options for self-hosting RSS subscriptions and I don’t actually understand what they are for. The very nature of RSS is that it tracks and connects to online content. It seems like having a home server track and download the content just so that you can download it on another device from your server instead of the original servers a bit redundant. Also, it seems like the clients are more limited, since it has ro connect to your personal host, as opposed to the many RSS readers available.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I genuinely don’t get it. What am I missing?

Rin@Rin@lemmy.zip

Replying to @⁨gedaliyah@lemmy.world⁩

Oh I can actually answer something, neat.

I thought I was missing the appeal too, but when I got back into tabletop roleplaying games, a lot of the community is located over on Substack blogs, and I don’t like Substack. My solution was to start running FreshRSS and put all of the feeds into it so I could read at my own pace, and also not have to go to a million sites to keep track of content. Saves me a lot of tabs in an internet browser, if nothing else.

Sadly, not all sites or blogs have RSS feeds to hand out, but I’ve used https://openrss.org/ to get around that for the most part if they don’t.

openrss.orgOpen RSSOpen RSS is a nonprofit organization that provides free RSS feeds for websites that don't have them
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