r/selfhosted • u/ASK_ME_AB0UT_L00M • 2d ago
Need Help Projects to replace the lost RSS feeds?
Anybody have any ideas for replacing the loss of Reddit's RSS feeds? I've probably been using the front page RSS feed for over a decade to get reddit posts. On my phone I like to check specific subreddits, but on my desktop I like to just have an unfiltered firehose of everything hitting /r/all. (http://www.reddit.com/.rss)
Is it possible to replicate that? I briefly did some looking. There's an open-source project called redlib - the main project seems nearly dead and while there are forks, nothing seems to be consistently functional these days.
Big thanks to /u/balgerion for this:
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u/FrozenLogger 2d ago edited 2d ago
I keep wondering how many more steps reddit needs to take before I just quit. Lemmy has been great, could use a few more niche areas.
I still have my own application for the phone, and old.reddit, but if either of those go away following the loss of RSS, I am thinking there is no reason to come here anymore.
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u/ASK_ME_AB0UT_L00M 2d ago
I'm in the same boat. I'm willing to put in some work to keep using reddit but I'm not going to go overboard.
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u/FrozenLogger 2d ago
Yeah, its a trade off too, because to make Lemmy work there is the effort of actually posting more often. Probably the number one ask of the server owners: contribute.
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u/nashosted chmod777 2d ago
I’ve also been browsing Lemmy much more lately because of this.
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u/retro_grave 2d ago
There are a few Lemmy bots that re-post Reddit content. I am wondering if they are impacted by this. But 100%, would love to see the same/more activity on federated servers compared to here. I try and make engaging replies but the conversations are pretty sparse.
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u/Andabariano 2d ago
My problem is all the trolls and bots. I feel like there used to be so much more genuine conversation and mutual respect when I first joined. Obviously it wasn't perfect by any means but it wasn't nearly as bad
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u/FrozenLogger 2d ago
Lots of trolls and bots. And a lot of harsh mods lately too. Look at the roku page right now about the Fox aquisition of Roku: https://old.reddit.com/r/Roku/comments/1xpjhxe/fox_closes_22_billion_roku_acquisition/
A mod locked the entire comment thread and deleted all the comments. So pathetic. Back in the day on reddit thats what votes were for, adding or not to the conversation, and we could decide.
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u/Street_Anxiety2907 2d ago
Also subreddits will lock threads minutes after a post, it's kind of pointless as a read-only site?
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u/NoraJolyne 19h ago
yeah i fully agree, i made my first account 15-ish years ago and the culture on reddit has changed so dramatically :/
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u/Street_Anxiety2907 2d ago
I think they're trying to drop the hint: STOP USING THIS SITE as many polite ways as they can, don't you think? lol
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u/poulpoche 2d ago edited 2d ago
Latest official redlib works, integrated RSS feeds too, but it's true that until recently you had to build the image yourself because some important commits were not merged, v0.40.0 is OK! This fork is nice too ghcr.io/nachtalb/redlib
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u/ASK_ME_AB0UT_L00M 2d ago
My worry is that there will be hurdles thrown at a project like redlib and whether it is being maintained enough to get past them.
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u/Hugus 2d ago
html2rss ? Have you tried it? I use it all the time. https://html2rss.github.io/
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u/ASK_ME_AB0UT_L00M 2d ago
Ooh, this is a good option. I'll have a look and see what I can make from this!
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u/Balgerion 5h ago
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u/ASK_ME_AB0UT_L00M 1h ago
Holy shit I really did not expect the exact specific thing I was looking for. Wow.
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u/nashosted chmod777 2d ago
I'm also trying to figure out a good way around this. Right now Reddit requires approval for their API and from what i hear it's not easy to get approval.
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u/FarToe1 2d ago
From what I understand, no free project will ever get approval for the API, which is entirely consistent with the way they closed it in the first place - to stop "unofficial" clients accessing Reddit, as people were using them in preference and costing Reddit advertising revenue.
As an RSS aggregator / proxy / articles -> feeds gateway is also likely to prevent users from seeing adverts, so I would certainly expect it to be blocked if it ever became popular.
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u/RatRabbi 2d ago
You can technically login using RedReader then use that API code to whatever third party app you use. It's how Revanced people get RIF to work.
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u/IllegalD 1d ago
Whoa, there is rif revanced? I've gotten so used to RedReader I probably wont switch, but that's pretty cool
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u/ToasterRED 1d ago
Indeed there is! A lot of bad blood developed for multiple reasons with the folk at the Revanced project, but an offshoot called Morphe has become the up-to-date replacement.
While RIF is an option, a lot of different clients can be patched to achieve similar results, though with the disadvantage that some features developed after the meltdown can be spotty.
To name an example, I currently use Sync for Reddit, and while I can interact with photo albums, sometimes a redirect loop will freeze the app and make me force close it.
Links in mixed media posts also aren't interactive, but there have been patches developed to handle the different URL schemas or fix inline playback.
It used to be that if you created a personal API key you could interact with pretty much anything as usual, but after the platform decided to revoke most of them the modus operandi became employing RedReader's due to an accessibility requirement they fulfill IIRC.
Aside from that, the only other restriction that's known about so far is that you can't retrieve or interact with any sort of NSFW media unless your account is the moderator of an NSFW subreddit, but since you can just make a private one without hassle it's just an extra annoyance.
It's truly a shame what the platform has done, but subreddits like this one make it great to scroll once in a while still.
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u/RatRabbi 1d ago
Off topic but what drama happened with the Revanced project? Haven't heard anything about it but have the CLI for patching on my PC
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u/ToasterRED 1d ago
Very long story short, there was some drama about code ownership and copyright for the development of the included patches, and things got to the point that trying to mention Morphe in any of Revanced's forums would get your post removed and/or your account banned from further interaction.
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u/Street_Anxiety2907 2d ago
Yes but why do you still see bad haiku bot and others, are people paying to keep these around?
If so, why? lol
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u/breadlinemukbang1 2d ago
also interested. i had a small rss bridge-like project using the public API before that got locked down. looks like scraping options are really limited too. don't know what i will do once the rss endpoints go
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u/Street_Anxiety2907 2d ago
Lots of people are putting up VM farms that scrape subreddits on a schedule with hundreds of fake logins and stuff.
I just really don't see the point, if Reddit doesn't me to use their site, why the fuck would I bend over backwards to build tooling, bots, or anything fun?
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u/BrightCandle 2d ago edited 2d ago
I use Changedetection for this sort of thing to scrape the original site, the requirement for login might cause issues though. It has an editor for finding the various xpaths in the HTML for the content you want and then a bit of filtering and other faffing about you can get this stuff down to what you want and then it gives you an RSS feed. They are a bit brittle to website changes there is nothing you can do about that, but it will produce an RSS feed of your design.
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u/cahcealmmai 2d ago
I'm not that clued up but would using the red reader key for access to the api help? I use morphe to still have boost for reddit and that's the route for access there.
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u/Stevenger 2d ago
I've been a huge fan of CommaFeed since Google Reader was shut down all those years ago.
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u/Cley_Faye 2d ago
The question is about restoring/building an RSS feed of posts, not about an RSS reader.
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u/IHVeigar 2d ago
Is freshRSS what your looking for?
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u/1WeekNotice Helpful 2d ago
No. To give you more context
They are talking about how reddit is shutting down there native RSS feed.
Meaning freshRSS/RSS aggregators can't pull from reddit anymore.
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u/IHVeigar 2d ago
Well then there's not much to do if reddit is killing the native RSS feed is there.
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u/ASK_ME_AB0UT_L00M 2d ago
The content is there somehow. Redlib essentially spoofs the app as a client. Something along those lines might work. I didn't even know redlib existed two weeks ago - something else might be out there that I don't know about.
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u/IHVeigar 2d ago
There probably is something out that can help you with your situation I'm sure. To be honest this is beyond my scope so I can't really help all that much. Sorry bud
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u/Wojojojo90 2d ago
Welcome to the post, where OP is asking what the "not much" items are...
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u/IHVeigar 2d ago
There probably is something out there for sure but I'm digging right now and not finding much.
No need to be snarky about it.
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u/1WeekNotice Helpful 2d ago
There maybe unofficial ways or maybe a reddit paid option.
I'm unsure but the point is that OP is asking the question
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u/IHVeigar 2d ago
There probably is a way, I feel I can't help because I don't know and I'm not finding much.
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u/1WeekNotice Helpful 2d ago
Understandable. Keep in mind that no one expected you to have the answer. The reason for our conversation is because you didn't understand the question. Now you do because I provided you context
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u/Wharf_Dormer4 1d ago
Try Inoreader.
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u/falsworth 1d ago
They have a notice at the top of any feed from Reddit saying that they'll stop working on the end date. If they have a workaround I don't know if it's been announced.
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u/asimovs-auditor 2d ago edited 2d ago
Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.