this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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Technology

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So, this isn't meant to be a "guide" or anything but I thought it could be helpful to some.

  • Find yourself an RSS feed reader (e.g. Feedbin).
  • Grab your subreddit link. (Example: reddit.com/r/museum)
  • Add .rss to the end of that link. (Example: reddit.com/r/museum.rss)
  • Add your subreddit RSS feeds to your feed reader.

This way, you can keep reading reddit without having to visit it. You will still need an account to participate, of course.

But I asked myself this question: "Do I really want to participate and keep feeding reddit content for free?"

You are what makes reddit what it is. If you can be yourself elsewhere, why waste your precious time on reddit?

You deserve better.

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[–] lawliot@beehaw.org 31 points 1 year ago

They'll kill it off eventually. old.reddit is on the chopping block next.

[–] arthur@lemmy.ml 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

In my head I see them clipping the RSS off. One of the "reasons" for the price hike was to keep AI bots from scraping the site and I assume RSS is one of those ways?

[–] stom@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago

I don't think the comments are available via RSS, and that's a chunk of Reddit's usefulness.

[–] Hagarashi8@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 year ago

They would 100% do it. No doubt.

[–] fred@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The only thing you get out of rss is the title of the post, and a link to the post comments and whatever the external link was (if it wasn’t a self post).

[–] grizzzlay@beehaw.org 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've moved over to Beehaw purposefully and while this is a nice feature, the point is to get away from Reddit. The majority of content produced there come from links from other websites. It's just a matter of rebuilding and discussing those things in new networks :)

[–] crisisingot@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

A lot of it is also the moderation of certain subreddits though that's not easy to replicate elsewhere. For instance most subreddits dedicated to football (soccer) clubs maintain a tier list of journalists based on their reliability and will only allow reputable sources to be posted on the subreddit.

That's quite frankly a lot of bullshit that I would otherwise have to sort through myself to get the same information on transfer movements and news

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[–] feetongrass@beehaw.org 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That might not work as you think it would because the rss feed does not include the discussions. For that you need to visit reddit, and discussions are what make reddit what it is. I'd much rather if they migrate here, but if that's not possible, at least if we have a bot crossposting stuff from there to here, so that we can have our own discussions going on that topic.

[–] pm_me_your_lofi@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

half the fun is repeating the same jokes from r/whothefuckup

[–] jack@compuverse.uk 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm completely new to this whole lemmy thing, but I'm hoping it can take off and grow to be a diverse and varied reddit alternative. Seeming really cool so far.

There are some subreddits that I really will miss and hope to see them come over to the lemmy-verse, but I think in the long run if lemmy can grow enough, I'll be content with the content (ha)

[–] Animoscity@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

I'm foreseeing a large influx of people testing out the lemmy waters in the next week. I knew the CEO was a POS but waited to see what he had to say to the Apollo claims. Pretty much sealed it for me. This can be a big site/service if the people use it. I was around for the fall of Digg, and hopefully the fall of Reddit.

[–] god@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 year ago

Be the change you want to see. Don't wait for your shit to arrive. Bring it yourself.

[–] lemillionsocks@beehaw.org 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Even reddit wasn't this full of niche esoteric subs over night and a lot of that subdivision had to happen because the main subreddits got too big and full of noise. You can still try and foster discussion in larger instances with broader topics and likely get a few bites for discussion while the more niche stuff takes off.

[–] strepto@kbin.social 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Until Reddit stops offering RSS

[–] cih@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago

Nail -> coffin.

[–] SuspiciousUser@lemmy.ml 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I do this with Inoreader. I subscribe to the Top Week RSS for each subreddit. It looks like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/top/.rss?t=week

This cuts down my usage to only the most important/popular topics. It helps me waste less time and gets rid of the addicted feeling where you're sitting there refreshing the front page seeing the same things you saw five minutes ago repeatedly.

Because I know there's only going to be 'x' number of posts each day from each Reddit I find myself engaging with them more carefully, more mindfully. And when the feed runs out, I go read a book or do something else. It's very freeing. I'm setting up Lemmy to be the same.

[–] Fauzruk@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Yes the push-based approach of getting content with RSS is truly great. It is a bit of a shame that RSS got niche, even though most media sites still provide feeds fortunately.

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[–] baduhai@sopuli.xyz 17 points 1 year ago

This is somewhat of a workaround, but it doesn't include what I actually use reddit for; the engagement. By that I mean comments, upvotes and users.

[–] Hellebert@beehaw.org 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'd rather use my social media time on a platform like what we're on now and use Google when I need to find an answer to some question that might be answered on Reddit.

My only hope is that it doesn't turn into Voat and get overwhelmed with fringe view conspiracy cookers and go to poop.

[–] DarbyDear@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This is my concern. That being said, I don't think that's quite as likely to happen because the reason for Voat's creation was fundamentally different. The Lemmy exodus is because of API changes and the treatment of Apollo's creator, while Voat was created as a result of a crackdown on hate subreddit (/r/fatpeoplehate was the big one, but this was years ago so I might be misremembering things).

That being said, I do specifically remember that the driving force behind the Voat push was "free speech." I'm pretty sure we know who screams the loudest about free speech at the expense of all else, and it looks like Beehaw at least was created with the core idea of being against that crowd. So, while I can't speak for Lemmy as a whole, I'm trying to at least be optimistic about Beehaw, since the reason for the exodus is completely different from the Voat exodus,meaning the migrants will have a different composition.

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[–] slash_nick@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

I think that because Lemmy is federated it has a strong defense against becoming Voat. Sure, there will be some instances that pop up that allow/tolerate that shit but then other Lemmy instances can just block them!

[–] biscuitsofdoom@beehaw.org 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've always loved rss. It's the best way to get news if you don't want to use Reddit or Twitter and want one place with different sources.

[–] perkele@sopuli.xyz 10 points 1 year ago

Same, and it's an open standard. We need to take the web back to open platforms and standards.

[–] Superjet2001@beehaw.org 14 points 1 year ago

It works, but feels dirty..

[–] DannySpud@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Remember that Chrome extension for YouTube that would replace YouTube comments with a Reddit comment thread instead? Couldn't you do something similar between Reddit and a Lemmy instance? Scrape all the posts like this RSS feed but replace the comments with Lemmy comments?

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[–] kaybinator@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There are so many reddit alternatives, I really hope some alternative will come up on the top and I surely hope that reddit fails massively.

[–] sotolf@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

While I agree with you it will be sad to see some of the small communities I'm a part of die, maybe some of them will rescurrect, but I have my doubts on some of them, very niche stuff where it's hard to gather together people.

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[–] SeeJayEmm@lemmy.one 12 points 1 year ago

I know it's all about "engagement" but I feel like this is still driving traffic to the site. Which is kinda the opposite of leaving it.

[–] eight_byte@feddit.de 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The same works with .json at the end if you want to consume it in JSON format. In fact, that's exactly what some of the third party Reddit apps do until the day. However, I just want to mention that it is just a question of time until Reddit will shut down this feature. As soon as they introduce their new API pricing, they need to force users into using their new APIs instead of using this kind of workaround from old Reddit times. So better do not rely on this to work any longer.

[–] Anafabula@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 1 year ago

At least the .json endpoints count as api for reddit

Will this affect the inherent .json representation of all Reddit pages? (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/.json )

Yes, .json endpoints are considered part of our API and are subject to these updated terms and updates.

https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/-/jgrqitu

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[–] Johnnypneumoniac@lemmy.one 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've typed and deleted a bunch of comments on Reddit the last few days. I will no longer participate. I will only use old reddit or rss feeds and consume it.

[–] itsjxssica@lemm.ee 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I've replaced all my comments with this:

This comment has been erased in protest of Reddit's recent API changes. For more details, read this open letter As an alternative to reddit, I have moved to Lemmy. Consider signing up on smaller instances to prevent larger instances from crashing; you can still interact with communities from any instance.

hopefully people that aren't super aware of what's going on because they only find reddit through search results see this

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[–] duringoverflow@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

but you're still "visiting" it. It is just your reader that makes the https request instead of your browser. In their logs and stats you are still visible. The only difference is that you will have a user-agent that shows that it is an RSS reader instead of a browser. Like:
"GET /atom.xml" 304 0 "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 16 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)"
And while you've the RSS reader open it while make requests periodically so we're talking for multiple visits as well.

[–] cih@beehaw.org 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] luciole@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's so good to see Beehaw taking off. I hope it endures. I'm giving it a little more time then I'm closing account on all corporate social media for good.

[–] anthoniix@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I hope beehaw overtakes lemmy.ml. Seems like a really nice instance.

[–] luciole@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve been thinking about it. I do hope Beehaw grows enormously to be vibrant and diverse and lively, but it’s OK too if in the end it’s not the ultimate, humongous, massive instance. Maybe there’s such a thing as a community that becomes too big. There’s something precious about "human scale" places.

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[–] MBM@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Now I wonder if it's possible to 'link' RSS feeds with ActivityPub. I guess it's always possible to have a bot make Lemmy posts from the feed.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yea ... bridges should be possible in theory ... which would be interesting.

Also, just in case you didn't know ... lemmy communites also provide RSS feeds (look for the icon at the top of a community page).

The inventor of RSS theorised not long ago that the fediverse would be glued together by RSS. They're obviously biased, but still an interesting idea, especially given that fediverse apps are struggling somewhat with how the platforms all have different APIs

[–] Manticore@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (8 children)

RSS seems really handy tbh, and yet I've never gotten around to ever using it. I looked up what the term was, went 'oh neat' and continued to ignore each time the RSS icon appeared on a webpage.

Maybe I should look into an RSS reader. Seems I could pull from multiple different sources and curate something far more interesting/relevant to me than, say, Google's 'Discover' page.

[–] greysemanticist@lemmy.one 6 points 1 year ago

Fun fact: Aaron Swartz who helped create RSS, was involved early in the development of Reddit.

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[–] JohSny@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Can anyone recommend a good rss reader program for windows? Not something browser based and bonus points if it has offline capabilities.
Thanks!

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[–] dxcz@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

I’ve considered that this might be a helpful tactic for NSFW communities — leave the moderation on Reddit and just bring content over here 🤷

[–] chovy@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

...and setup an ifttt to repost rss to kbin !

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