Readable Site Summaries
Liferea is my current RSS feed reader. Ive used the internet for a very long time without an news aggregator. I would guess this is the case for most people. It was only when I decided I wanted to distance myself from online services that curate content that I realized what a great tool RSS is. RSS is a standard on the internet but it is so discreet with its unassuming orange icon you might never notice that your favorite website has an RSS feed. When I decided to start using an RSS feed it was mainly to manage my YouTube subscriptions without the need for an account but I soon found that it made keeping up with blogs and other websites that I frequent without actually having to visit the page to check for new content.
Liferea
There is no lack of reliable RSS applications and browser plugins. I had no trouble finding a good RSS application. After Some comparison and consideration I landed on Liferea RSS reader. Lifereas is free and open source. It manages RSS feeds and has a built in web browser. Since I can sort the RSS feeds in a directory tree with Liferea I can categorize my YouTube subscriptions which is superior to the way YouTube’s web interface works. It also doesn’t recommend me any sponsored content. I also found that invidiou.us has superior RSS summaries so I used vim to replace all youtube urls with ones from invidious with the command %s/youtube.com/invidio.us/g I use Liferea to follow my favorite subreddits as well for similar reasons.
Alternatives
I saw many honorable mentions of KDE’s Akregator. Akregator has most of the same features of Liferea however its about twice the the size of Liferea at a whopping 6.1mb. There are also more minimal TUI RSS reader options in NewsBeuter and Newsboat as well. However these aren’t conducive to viewing preview images or web content.
Free from Hassle
Overall the greatest advantage of an RSS reader is the amount of time it has saved me from sifting through content. Aggregating your content makes it easier to find what you want and ignore the rest. Filtering information is an important part of digital hygiene that I think people will learn to appreciate and take more control of in the future.