This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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!
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.
Inoreader has been my go to, or The Old Reader which is closer to Google Readers style.
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.
One of my co-workers solely interacts with Reddit through RSS feeds, and has done that for years.
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.
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.
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.
I have switched from Google News to Artifact. Feels like a better algorithm.
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)
The big platforms have gotten a lot worse.
Twitter went fascist.
Canadians can't share news articles on Facebook.
Reddit self-owned.
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.
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.
I've done it.
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.
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.
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)
I love RSS too, but gradually drifted away from it over the years. After the Reddit emigration I started getting back into it, and just published a super basic TUI feed reader if anyone is interested.
It's called moccasin
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/
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.
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.
I just couldn't get into RSS feeds back when it was growing in its popularity. No chance I'll understand using it any better now lol. I am a fool of a took.
