Why are people hyped about RSS regaining relevance?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 /new feed cannot guarantee this.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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? :)
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)
Yes, still get my share of spam, especially on politics, but other than that it works ok.
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!).
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).
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.
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"?
I've done it.
Dyslectics trying to do their taxes?
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.
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 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
What are the compelling features compared to e.g. newsboat?
I dunno, probably very few. I wrote it myself in a week. From a quick glance, Newsboat does not support "open in browser" outside of Linux, and is unconfirmed to even run on Windows. We do. Mocassin's interface also seems to be better suited to large screens and at-a-glance reading. Other than that they are years ahead.
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
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 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.
There's no way you are in a decentralized aggregator site but don't get RSS.
You can always end up somewhere, even if you fall ass backwards into it. While I understand what RSS is, what I fail to understand is how people find it useful. I never understood using RSS to see 2 lines of a headline article that I'm going to go to the website for anyways. So it just never fit my workflow. Hopefully that makes it make a bit more sense.
Hear hear, I'm the same way. I went further and tried it out and like a pokémon, hurt myself in confusion.
It's just not an interesting way of browsing the internet. RSS treats everything to be of equal worth and it isn't.
If you can glance over 100 posts in 10 seconds that is of little importance. The issue is that nobody enabled good ways to do so. Also people should rather devote their times to priority purposes such as editing Wikipedia or developing open source software that is not some niche repo but e.g. MediaWiki or Lutris.
By the way, how to RSS your lemmy communities?
There's an RSS tag on instances and communities, at least when looking at it via a web browser. Is at an indiviual instance or community level, though - as far as I know you can't export your subscribed communities to link them all to an RSS reader in one go.
At least, there is for sh.itjust.works, dunno about other instances. See above blue smudge below.
Ah, thanks! I only used lemmy via app so far.
That would be something supported by the Lemmy (or kbin/mastodon/whatever) software. A quick look at the documentation doesn't indicate it's a supported view but I can't imagine it'd be hard to implement.
It'd probably be on a per community basis. If it's an unauthenticated request there'd be no way to immediately get subscribed communities. I'm not sure if authenticated RSS is a thing or not.
Thanks for the answer!
I miss RSS.
For me it has to do with this
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.
I would like the majority to keep using the ad infested web so I can use RSS and Lemmy.
If everyone used RSS, companies would quickly complain that they don't make money on their shitty web sites.
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.)
Never stopped using it.
New news wire works great for watching my subscriptions on YouTube Odysee and peertube. I just click it opens in an isolated browser watch the video close the app and it restarts
RSS readers are great and although they have falling out of favor, they certainly aren't dead. The fall in usage of RSS is directly correlated with the fall in the number of people reading blogs on a daily basis.
I'm not sure if RSS usage has really fallen. Most websites still have RSS / Atom feeds, and I hear about a lot more people getting into it these days. I'm sure the proportion of people using the internet who use RSS feeds has gone down a lot, but in absolute terms there might be as many users as ever? Maybe it's not quite at the heights it was when everybody was using Google Reader, I'm sure quite a few people gave up when that died. Though, if you count podcasts as RSS then it probably more than makes up for it!
is RSS a browser plugin
Opening paragraph on Wikipedia explains it pretty well
RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication)[2] is a web feed[3] that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator, which constantly monitor sites for new content, removing the need for the user to manually check them. News aggregators (or "RSS readers") can be built into a browser, installed on a desktop computer, or installed on a mobile device.
RSS was peak internet. All been downhill since then.
*peak, not weak.