selfh.st was a website that was included in my RSS feed for reading news about self hosting and such for a while now. I never felt it was that helpful for me since I usually add the release notes of the services I use individually on my feed. I would often read out of curiosity.
I also felt their feed was always very clunky to be honest, it was never formatted properly but at least there was content there. In the middle of the huge images there was at least a little bit of information to be seen.
9 months ago their feed broke (because they changed their domain or something like that) and since then, I noticed the website is kind of declining? I kind of hate the overuse of enshittification but there are no other words for me to define this. Many red flags were already ignored before by the way, including the usage of AI slop imagery and a change of interface for the worse, to include information about sponsors.
They started sending the feeds with: “This is a feature reserved to premium users” with a link to their website. Felt very icky.
I do NOT expect people that make content to keep doing it without support (we support a few independent news outlets, also donate every now and then to projects we use a lot), however the way they are trying to get said support is very… weird. Like trying to boost numbers, if that makes sense? If done different I would gladly give them a subscription each month, but this hit me in a weird way.
Anyway, I won’t be part of their audience anymore. Are there other websites which focus on self hosting have on your feed?
I don’t have any other websites to recommend, but wanted to address your title with a slightly opposing view. To the main point of the RSS feed being mostly just an announcement feed redirecting you to the website: I fully agree and this is my pet peeve with certain RSS feeds.
I’ve followed selfh.st since their early posts and it seems just as useful to me today, which is being used as a “this may be useful information related to self-hosting, or maybe not” tool. Sometimes they post a really good article and sometimes I delete it within a few seconds of skimming; it all depends on the week.
I subscribe via the email newsletter instead of RSS and I don’t load images in my email client, but yes I agree that the images are obnoxiously large when loaded. Otherwise, it’s a great 2-minute email/feed to read each week to see if there’s anything I’d interested in and haven’t heard of before. I don’t use social media, aside from browsing Lemmy and Hacker News, so it fills a gap for me where others may use sites like Twitter or Reddit.
You can still read all of the content without donating, so it’s more about whether you find the few random benefits worth a donation or not. Or if RSS paywalls are a deal breaker. For me, the information delivered to my inbox is useful enough to keep around.