According to Google Trends, during the past few years, there has been nothing but a few minor bumps that faded away as quickly as they came. I love RSS because i do not have to scroll through dozens of different news sites all day and i would love it to return.
EDIT: Typical case of people only reading the headline. I was asking why people are hyped over something that did NOT happen.
Because then they can avoid social media again by building their own catalog of interest.
For me, the value of RSS is bypassing the fucking algorithm.
Just give me the raw feed from the websites I like. No suggestions, no “someone else liked this.” Just the raw firehose of content that I asked for.
I mean algorithms have their flaws but there is a reason they became popular.
Subscribe to a dozen RSS feeds and suddenly you have more content then you can read with no easy way to sort through the chuff. Also no easy way to discover content beyond your feeds.
The reason why RSS didn’t become popular was because content creators didn’t know how to monetize them while still having to pay for hosting fees.
Social media built walled gardens that could drive traffic to certain content creators if it was in the social media company’s best interest. Content creators moved to social media since the carrot was too much to resist.
Wasn’t that how YouTube used to work tho? Still I think it’s better discovering new channels, but that makes it harder for the new users I suppose
You can also use it to create your own “algorithm”.
With Reddit I’ve always subscribed to each subreddit individually, sometimes adding filters like “/hot/?limit=10”, which only shows posts that reach the Top 10 posts in /hot. That way I wouldn’t miss any post in niche subs while being able to individually scale the amount of posts I get shown from the bigger subs.
You can do the same here on Lemmy, although I still haven’t felt the need to configure it, since staying on top of /new is still doable.
This is the reason why for me, I actually took it one step further and rebuilt a front end news site with Django and shared the link out with friends who are interested in the same topics, added a discussion feature. Essentially, I have a python script that runs and pulls RSS feed data. If the whole article isn’t included then it uses Asyncio, aiohttp, and Beautifulsoup to pull in the article. Dump all that to a Postgres instance then have Django run on top of it. It’s like deconstructing news to reconstruct it
Would you mind sharing this? I would be very interested in running my own instance of this and modifying it to fit my needs!
There’s still an algorithm and “like” system in that scenario: clicks. The news providers generate more content based on what was clicked most.
Some sites are more objective in what they report on, but there’s still going to be biases in what you’re fed.
In that regard, I’m not sure how different subscribing to certain communities is from subscribing to certain news outlets.
Clickbait is obviously an issue with many media outlets but given that you curate your RSS feeds you can just dump them. Once reddit died I made plenty of changes to my media diet. It left me with way less sources but I’m certain all I lost was low quality reporting and other kinds of outrage bait.
I do kinda like the idea of some kind of curation, but I’d like the algorithm to be transparent to me, so that I can go in and see what’s been filtered out, for instance, and why.
Some guy on Mastodon a while back was working on a service that’d give him a digest of daily posts he’d missed from his feed. I could see the value in something like that, as long as you control the algorithm yourself.
I think I’m still stuck on the idea of a daily edition. A finite selection of post or articles and maybe a funny pages section too. Like a newspaper in the olden days.
What is Reddit if not a glorified collection of RSS feeds with comments?
What is Reddit if not a glorified collection of RSS feeds with comments?
I went from Google Reader to Reddit. It scratched very much the same itch. I remember having quite the curated list of RSS feeds subscribed to. Still pissed that Google killed it.
We really just need a Reader replacement. I’m sure there is something out there I don’t know about.
If not, perhaps I’ll make one and become a billionaire on the RSS bandwagon!
I used Feedly for many years, but recently switched to Newsblur, and I love that it lets me filter out posts by tags or keywords, finally don’t have to use external tools for it.
Is Feedly still a thing and okay? I remember it being the stopgap between Google Reader and Reddit, however I’m not sure where it lies on the “free version is good enough” vs “completely gimped free version and the real product is the paid one”
The comments are why most people go there. It’s the major differentiator from other social media platforms. Holding a conversation on Reddit is much clearer than any other site. If YouTube has comments like reddit it would be a very interesting change to a lot of content that goes on Reddit at the moment.
My immediate thought about Reddit. Sure I discover some things there but what I really enjoy is seeing people’s reaction and genuine discussion (the quality of which is much better on Lemmy).
I’d love to use RSS but it feels rather lonely by comparison.
Among other problems, in youtube posters can delete comments, so when someone calls bullshit the poster can just delete, here that power is limited to moderators but you can still check deleted comments. Another thing is that thumbs down isnt visible, another useful information taken away. Comments are not structured in trees, and the list continues…
I view it just as much through the lense of entertainment as I do an essential check on disinformation both in the framing used by the actual post as well as clearing through bots and other dirty tricks/bullshit in the comments.
The one thing I will commend Twitter on is its introduction of “Context”. It can be shocking how misleading or disingenuous headlines can be when you give them even an inch sometimes
One of my co-workers solely interacts with Reddit through RSS feeds, and has done that for years.
I love RSS, but having comments and a sorting algorithm makes a world of difference
If you used Reddit sorted as “new” exclusively, it would essentially be a collection of RSS feeds. But, what most people sort by “popular” or “hot” or “top” or something. Chronological sorting vs. algorithmic sorting is an absolutely key difference for RSS vs. other social feeds.
Right after Reddit melted I dusted off feed the and updated all my RSS feeds.
If you have any great RSS feeds to share, post them here.
You can copy the URL directly from each item in this list and easily add to your favorite reader.
There are other lists as well for US news, etc.
feedspot - top 100 world news feeds
For iOS users: NetNewsWire is a good, free app
Here is my problem with that list: it is almost entirely general news feeds. If you subscribe the the first 20 you are going to see the same story 20 times. I’m looking for niche information that is curated. Slashdot, Science Based Medicine, Nature, Factcheck, Neurologica, that kind of stuff where it’s not the same stories covered by everyone else.
i would love it to return.
RSS never died though, I have at least 50 web sites that I follow.
Ars Technica, BBC and Reuters are big enough that you may find a channel of your liking, that was my starting point.
What are your interests?
Tiny Tiny RSS has been great for me. Popped it on a VPS and it’s been running for years now trouble.
RSS is great for following blogs and sites of specific interests, like local sites, or sites about specific subjects. You get ALL the updates. For example. I live in Baltimore and have a bunch of local sites in my RSS reader.
Reddit/Lemmy, on the other hand, is a more democratically human curated and upvoted aggregator so while it hits all the popular stuff beyond the topics you follow on RSS, it will miss a lot too.
So I use both.
Feedly for hundreds of sites of interest. And Reddit and now Lemmy for the rest.
Good stuff!
What would be nest is a feed aggregatior that combos as a lemmy / larger fedi client. When reading your feed, there can be a comments button. The button would do a quick lookup to see if there has been any discussions tracked on your instance for that link and if so let you choose on of the results to join a discussion and a start new thread button that has a workflow for posting the link in a community you select.
Good to see a fellow feedly user. I’m curious, have you subscribed for any of the premium feedly features and if so, would you say they are worth it?
no, been a freebie user since Google Readers died and honestly, for the way I use it, to pop on and scroll through the feed then clicking on some articles? I’ve never felt limited or like I needed to pay to do anything.
I am Feedly user as well, but use the FeedMe app on Android. I prefer that app over the Feedly one, it’s free, and I can add as many categories as I want whereas Feedly limits it to three or so in the free version :)
