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.
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That would be great. Having to install Signal, Discord and WhatsApp is bad enough because of all the groups! Maybe it is time to create a new app that pulls in data from all other apps by their API.
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You are right, I was only ~10% serious.
@jabberati @duviobaz they will resist for sure.
What is Reddit if not a glorified collection of RSS feeds with comments?
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.
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
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…
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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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.
and the weighing is the entire problem.
It’s also the fundamental value prop.
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
/new
feed 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,
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.
I took the same path, probably the first time google broke my heart.
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And not the last, I’m sure 😆
It was gpm for me…
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!
inoreader is excellent
Inoreader has been my go to, or The Old Reader which is closer to Google Readers style.
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.
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…
I’ve been using Flym since they killed Reader.
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.
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.
Artifact
Can you share any details about what you like about it? :)
Never heard of that one before but will definitely try. Thanks
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
I miss RSS.
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
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.
Blame? Fuck Facebook, the less relevant it is the better.
i would love it to return.
RSS never died though, I have at least 50 web sites that I follow.
I think they mean get popular again, see more robust support and integration, etc.
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 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.
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.
For me it has to do with this
- I want a feed that updates based on my subscription
- That subscription content could be anything, blog posts, updates on a Wikipedia page (to keep up to date with a news story that is out of the limelight), or get updated with a XKCD comic
RSS meets both these, dead simple. It’s also low in data usage, but it’s for those reasons that I recently started using RSS after leaving it years ago.
P.S. I believe some blame goes toward “fragmentation”, i.e. we still need to check a couple of websites for something new. RSS solves that by bringing all that into one place
It seems like Activitypub could do these two things and maybe more.
Sounds interesting, especially with the fact you can comment on it. Only issue is getting sites to adopt it, and currently RSS is just dead simple to implement.
Does that chart include actual RSS hits or only “RSS” used in things like this post and my questions? Or does it read minds to find their interest in RSS?
I should note that I firmly HOPE that it does NOT include actual RSS hits (when your reader pulls another post in an RSS feed) because that would mean Google sits in line with every RSS feed. (I also HOPE it does not read minds, for the record.)
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’ll give you a raw firehose of content.
No homo.
Yes homo make it really gay
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.
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 only algorithm I want is the classic “Sort by Magic.”
What’s that?
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
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
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
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
That sounds awesome! Any chance you’d be willing to share your code?
Would you mind sharing this? I would be very interested in running my own instance of this and modifying it to fit my needs!
also check out miniflux
Newsblur also does something similar and is self-hostable.
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.
I use a RSS reader for my daily news across multiple sites and I don’t know what to do if sites stop supporting it.
Take a look at RSS-Bridge and RSSHub. They provide feeds for many websites that don’t provide their own RSS feed.
I never stopped using RSS but its always been an additional source not the sole source of info for me. A lot of folks I’ve followed on various social media or who write for online mags have a personal site where they post long-form stuff. RSS is great if you want to just get a list of those authors latest posts and you don’t want to sort through thousands of other stories to find them.
Personally I like using the Livemarks add-on in Firefox because I’m already in the browser anyway and I can manage those bookmarks using the standard bookmarks manager to keep them in any organizational structure I find convenient. Here’s the github page but you can search for it in Firefox Add-ons as well: https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/
RSS was peak internet. All been downhill since then.
*peak, not weak.
Never stopped using it.
Maybe sort of off topic, but it seems like activity pub could provide the same functionality (and maybe more) as RSS.
If a news site or anything else that posts stuff periodically supported the activitypub protocol, anyone could subscribe to it, just like rss. Then when anything is posted you’d see it in your feed.
With activitypub (and not rss) you could comment on it and see other peoples comments, and crosspost it elsewhere.
There’s people already using it like that: off the top of my head, Nick from the linux experiment posts his videos and podcasts via @thelinuxEXP@mastodon.social
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.