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.
The way I like it. The showRSS feed is beautiful after using Google Home feed for so long. I’ll never go back to ads and Google trying to sell me pixel products and reviews every day
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
Funny you need YouTube. I have been rediscovering the “Subscriptions” tab recently. It’s a chronological view (newest first) of all Channels I am subscribed to, but I actually haven’t used it for years.
I’ve gotten used to the YouTube algorithm, going to the homepage and just finding whatever seemingly interesting videos YouTube suggests to me. However recently, YouTube made the strange decision to disable the homepage for people who disable Watch History. Now my YouTube homepage is entirely empty.
Anyway, going to the subscription tab it’s just a massive collection of random channels I’ve subscribed to over the years. It’s too messy to keep my interest, and I’ve actually been using YouTube less.
Same here, I have removed the home page (using ReVanced) so it automatically loads my subscriptions, as I found those has far better videos than my home feed at all. Homepage has really died, I keep getting the same videos I already watched, some obscure 39 views video keep annoying me and because I use YouTube music I also get recommended music, except they have like 100 views. It’s just so terrible.
I think YouTube has been disabling the homepage, so you are more intrigued to enable it. But it really just makes your and my lives easier. Either way it’s the only way to really enjoy the videos nowadays. Hopefully another platform comes along, but that hasn’t happened at all in over 20 years
That’s the thing, I personally liked the YouTube homepage! Even with watch history disabled, I found it gave me decent mix of recommendations based on my region, subscriptions and Liked videos. I know many people dislike the YouTube algorithm but it actually worked well for me.
Now that YouTube has disabled my homepage (held hostage unless I turn on Watch History), I am far less inclined to go on YouTube and watch random videos. Which is probably a good thing for me, let’s be honest. On the other hand I don’t know what YouTube wanted to achieve with this move. I find it hilarious that my homepage is empty now by Google’s own choice.
And you know what? The channels today are super sensational when it comes to their titles and thumbnails like it’s always about a curiosity gap or some extreme headline that makes you annoyed and I’m honestly over it. It’s just so hard to find good channels that are genuinely entertaining and don’t employ any of these. Honestly I’d go back to 2013 YouTube, it was far better
The only algorithm I want is the classic “Sort by Magic.”
What’s that?
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.
Individual/custom feeds would be awesome here. If I remember correctly from github, they are coming.
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!
Newsblur also does something similar and is self-hostable.
also check out miniflux
That sounds awesome! Any chance you’d be willing to share your code?
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.
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Yes homo make it really gay
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!
Was about to say lol. Right in those last days/weeks of Google Reader, Feedly loudly stepped up and offered to help people import their data over and continue on right in the nick of time. I’d assume the majority of people who had been on Reader, who didn’t quit using feeds entirely, probably migrated to Feedly the day Reader shut down.
That’s what I did! Over time I stopped looking at Feedly though. I replaced it with Reddit and Twitter mainly. Now that those sites have become Pure Evil I switched over to Apple News. I already pay for the Plus thing as part of the family bundle so might as well use it. The “Following” tab works like a personally-curated RSS feed list. If you want an algorithmic approach, you can use the “Today” tab.
The one main feature it’s still lacking that I really want is a pure chronological list of everything from my Following sources/topics. I sent them feedback so I’m sure it will show up any time in the next 5-15 years.
Inoreader has been my go to, or The Old Reader which is closer to Google Readers style.
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.
Newsblur
Trying this out now. It’s awesome. Might have found a new doomscrolling default…
Inoreader perhaps?
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”
I’m using the free version and not missing the paid features!
Handy News Reader (F-droid).
First time trying RSS, giving it a shot. Thanks!
Good luck, it’s kind of feature-rich so if you have any questions, feel free to ask. The dev is quite responsive (on Github) which is good.
I’ve been using Flym since they killed Reader.
inoreader is excellent
I took the same path, probably the first time google broke my heart.
And not the last, I’m sure 😆
It was gpm for me…
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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.
Lemmy + RSS is the way to go to get the best of both worlds then.
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.
RSS is quasi-archival, so it can give you a listing of new content sorted chronologically with no other input. Even reddit’s
/newfeed cannot guarantee this.
I love RSS, but having comments and a sorting algorithm makes a world of difference
i have lemmy for that. My rss feeds are extremely curated and very specific to want i know i want to read about,
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.
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and the weighing is the entire problem.
It’s also the fundamental value prop.
Its arguably also how content is “curated” which, at some point, is helpful for different uses. Nothing is pure asset or liabillity, it depends on implementation and audience.
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 had never used it until the Reddit event. Then I looked up what RSS was and realized that that’s how I was using Reddit, so might as well just do it that way. It’s so much better.
What are you interested in? I have lots of feeds haha
i would love it to return.
RSS never died though, I have at least 50 web sites that I follow.
Damn straight. Feedbin for me.
It has gotten less useful over time as content went elsewhere, but also I’ve been lazy about moving Substack feeds over.
What are some feeds you all follow? I’ve always been interested in the concept of RSS feeds but I’m not sure where to start for finding feeds that interest me.
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?
Thanks for replying. Tech, Linux, selfhosting, FOSS, motorcycles, mechanical work, home improvement, tools, shop type things.
The OPML I have on my phone is not as complete as the one on my PC, let me get back at you when I can and I’ll share some feeds for tech, Linux and FOSS.
you can use it to subscribe to youtube, odysee, peertube, podcasts, without an account. i use feedbro to get the youtube rss easy but lately i use freetube.
What do you use as your reader?
Tiny Tiny RSS has been great for me. Popped it on a VPS and it’s been running for years now trouble.
I think they mean get popular again, see more robust support and integration, etc.
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.
Same thing for me as well, I haven’t felt limited by anything in the free version. It’s great for things like hackernews and webcomics.
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 :)
Oh thanks for the tip. I’ll give Feedme a try
Unpopular opinion but I switched from RSS to Google News and Reddit / Lemmy for basically 2 things:
I like the Google algorithm for news (guess that’s why it’s called that) it shows relevant news, especially local. When I subscribed to local news papers’ RSS, for example, they pump a lot of articles and the relevant news were difficult to spot. It still lags behind on tech news for instance.
I switched to Reddit because of the community content: conversations. On RSS you get all the news and all that but it lacks the social aspect, people discussing an article, learning from others. This is why I’m still here.
I use RSS for news mostly. And Reddit for conversation. And Reddit has been phased out for lemmy.
That said, lemmy is still not populated quite enough for some of the more topic specific stuff. For example there’s gaming, but not game specific communities etc. I wish it had a bigger following.
Lately I have found the news discussions here as toxic if not more toxic than Reddit. I’ve just resolved to not discussing news unless it’s with friends over beers Reddit just doesn’t have a mobile app so f it.
Yes, I like RSS for tech news but I still prefer to read a discussion on it.
Kinda jealous tbh, I couldn’t get my Google news to actually work and it was 40% spam 40% clickbait 20% American news (and I live in Europe)
I only use Google Alerts and it’s absolute trash. You can set it to only give alerts for particular regions and it’s constantly giving me hits from India, USA, and Australia (I’m also in Europe!).
Yes, still get my share of spam, especially on politics, but other than that it works ok.
I have switched from Google News to Artifact. Feels like a better algorithm.
Never heard of that one before but will definitely try. Thanks
Artifact
Can you share any details about what you like about it? :)
There’s some good RSS feeds that break up into the content and comments. I love those because they remind me of Reddit and Lemmy. I think hackernews / ycombinator
The big platforms have gotten a lot worse.
Twitter went fascist.
Canadians can’t share news articles on Facebook.
Reddit self-owned.Canadians can blame their government for that
Blame? Fuck Facebook, the less relevant it is the better.
Well yes. When a monetary charge is imposed for doing some action, people may simply choose not to do that action anymore. Since the action was “as a big web site, publishing user-submitted links to news sites”, that’s what Facebook chose to stop doing.
I used to rely on news feeds through Firefox until they suddenly removed this feature. I switched to an RSS reader but around the same time, a lot of websites started dropping their RSS feeds. I’m out of the loop of why this happened and it’s probably one reason I feel so bored being online nowadays
It’s because RSS doesn’t allow you to serve ads and every tech company right now is either feeling the squeeze or feeling the greed.
Feeds can be set up to just show part of the article so you’d still have to visit the site to read it all, which seems a better solution than losing the traffic completely. I’ve deleted many sites that just stopped their RSS at some point and I just kind of forgot about them.
Also, why can’t sponsored texts be added to RSS? It seems to me this would be hard to block by adblockers (and I’ll probably unsubscribe, but still).
Modern ads aren’t simply bits of text or animated gifs anymore. They’re full tracking platforms that rely on analyzing a person’s usage in order to deliver them targeted ads. It’s much harder to do that over RSS.
I used to have a bunch of science and technology articles in Google Reader and tried to do a blog where I would look for possible synergies and connections. When Google shuttered it I tried to keep going on other readers but my ADHD struggled with the change and it turned into another hobby that fell to the wayside. Makes me sad because I was so much more informed then than I am now about a wide array of stuff.
I keep hearing about Google being part of the downfall but I honestly never heard of Google Reader until long after it got closed down. How was this different than other RSS readers?
Since it was completely server-hosted it was incredibly fast. You’d open it up and boom, everything all up to date. The search was fantastic. (Say what you will about Google but they’ve always been great at search. Very fast and very good results.) The site layout was clean and minimal. It was just a really good implementation. Of course they murdered it.
If you used Gmail in the early days, and ever used something before it, you probably had a moment where you said “wow, this is what email should have been all along”. Reader was the same.
When I ran a site, I dropped it because of the server load and lack of ad revenue from it. (My site was getting taken down by the host server, but probably mostly for another issue). That said, most sites seem to have a feed (though often hidden) and there are third parties that can make a feed for virtually any site.
Who the fuck Google searches for “RSS”?
People who are looking for a good RSS client for their phone?
People hoping that it would give a web page/post with a curated list of RSS URLs.
You wouldn’t include any terminology to narrow your search down? Just “RSS” seems overly broad, yeah?
please correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that this graph included any search with RSS in your search query. Otherwise it works be useless as people rarely search for something with just a single word.
I’ve done it.
Dyslectics trying to do their taxes?
the subset of those who do not use a proper search engine who want to know what a RSS is.
Beyond that, though, who the fuck would use Google’s search popularity as a metric for the popularity of a technology. Those who use it aren’t searching for it all the time. OP is dumb.
who the fuck would use Google’s search popularity as a metric for the popularity of a technology
that’s been a leading indicator of popularity for a long time now.
Why would that be a leading indicator? If anything those that use it are far less likely to Google it.
Search popularity is something like the first derivation (read: change in) popularity of a technology.
Calling people dumb is ableist.
Is there an alternative to saying somebody or something is dumb? Or that a choice was dumb? Genuinely asking. It just seems like it’s all ableist all the way down at that point, but I’ve not heard of dumb being called ableist before so am interested if there’s a better alternative? Short-sighted? Uninformed?
I feel like, at least in this context, it’s unnecessary.
If your in a submarine and OP tries to open the external hatch while submerged, sure call him dumb. If op leaves your baby in a scorpion pit because he thought it’d make the child gain super powers, dumb.
If, however, OP thinks that Google is a valid metric to gage how popular something is. “I disagree with using this as a valid metric and here’s the reasons why.”
No need to call him dumb. This post didn’t hurt or impact you personally. It’s just the original guy who called him dumb really doesn’t like google. Which is fine. Not gonna call him dumb for using duck duck go.
I agree, I don’t think using Google as an indicator of trends is wrong. I was just asking about why it is ableist is all :)
Most RSS feeds suck these days because sites just half ass those and put a link and 1 sentence inside, if even that.
If you’re not getting a full text feed for articles try changing your feed app (assuming android). I’m using handy News reader (flymm fork on F-droid). It retrives the full article text for all my feeds.
Some of us are “hyped” about it because when RSS fell out of favor we lost some of the RSS feeds we were using. This forced some of us to go looking for alternatives because the sites that had RSS feeds and dropped them were no longer accessible that way. And given that we see less ads and have to deal with less algorithms this way, we enjoy using RSS. If it becomes relevant enough again maybe those sources that were lost will come back. To be fair that’s probably a pipe dream. But ease of use, and use case are definitely some of the reasons.
I still use Feedly daily!
Inoreader for me
Couldn’t live without RSS, they’re literally my #1 source of info/news/updates.
It’s a no fuss that works so well, I don’t understand why anyone would prefer a Google feed or any other social media feed to get their updates.
I’m in full control of the sources, no shady content pushed to me from other sources just for ad revenues.
You should not assume that the google trend for RSS is linked to the popularity of RSS feeds. Nowadays, techies uses the term, but it is somewhat hidden for a lot of people through aggregation services and other names (atom, feed, etc.).
Contrary to the trend, there’s been a handful of people moving back to decentralized sites that supports it, and a lot of big sites never stopped supporting it. And it gets advertised as an alternative, even if not under the “rss” name.
People switched to twitter, that seems to be wearing off…
Yup, Twitter was the awesome condensed RSS alternative with great short summaries by necessity that melted down.
RSS is great for news, because you don’t get told what to think by a 3rd party algorithm, you aggregate news from trusted sites (multiple) and decide what to read.
RSS also is extremely important for podcasts, that’s how it gets pushed down to your listening app (except for specific ones like Spotify and whatnot that host the content)
There’s always an “algorithm” that’s biasing things though.
If you just grab the recent headlines from ABC, BBC or CBC in chronological order you’re still getting your feed biased by what news directors choosing is worth covering. With public broadcasters you’re hopefully getting less “clickbait” and more “this is important news the public needs”. But, even then, there’s going to be bias.
A third party isn’t involved. An RSS feed pulls in the data from the source.
My point is that you find a trusted news source and you don’t have Google, Facebook, Apple, or Xitter deciding what you should see.
