1y ago

YSK: Use RSS feeds to curate your online experience

Over reliance on algorithms has degraded the user experience to the point that the average user is drowning in ragebait and extremist politics, because they drive up engagement. Just like a toddler, algorithms don't discriminate between good and bad attention, so everything that gets clicks is thrust forward. Now, you could hope to train the algorithm to show you only postive things, but engagement is engagement and the algorithm curators often engage in rage farming, where your feed is injected with things that are likely to enrage you.

You can avoid this by installing an RSS reader, going to your favorite sites, and manually adding a RSS feed. Now, your reader has things that you manually selected, with the added bonus of having a content pipe free of malicious interference. You can also divide topics in a way that you can avoid certain themes and news until you decide to engage them.

106 comments

There was a time when Digg and Google Reader were still around that I never touched Reddit. I would just have Google Reader with a bunch of useful RSS feeds and if I wanted to have some social element, there was Digg. Then Digg shit the bed, Google got bored of Reader and I ended up on Reddit.
I think you’re right. It’s time to get RSS back in place.
- Feedly does a good job with the free version. I just went back to it a few weeks ago.
  
  Seconding Feedly. I was Google Reader ride or die till the last day, and Feedly stepped up and offered an account import iirc so people could just swap right over. Did so immediately and have been with them ever since.
  Hasn't been a single news story or article (in my fields of interest) that has popped up on Reddit over the last 12+ years that I haven't also seen via RSS feeds +/- an hour of it's appearance. Just have to deal once every couple years with removing/replacing a dead/changed feed and that's a mild enough annoyance with any RSS reader.
  
  I have found myself using Feedly more these past few weeks as well.
  If you're on Android, a great companion is the FeedMe app. It has a lot more customization options and can download (for offline reading) full articles, rather than just showing the snippet Feedly does.
- I'd suggest getting into the !selfhosted@lemmy.world community. Plenty of alternatives to host your own rss feed manager that helps to keep that feeling of "freedom" when reading your stuff. I'm personally attached to freshrss, and it works great!
- Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't most RSS feeds just have the Title and a snippet these days. You still have to click through to read the article, right?
  
  They mostly do by default, which is pretty annoying. But there are ways around it. I'm currently self-hosting a Miniflux instance where I can set per-feed whether or not it will try to parse the full text of each article. Most of the time that works, but on the off chance it doesn't I fall back to Morss by prepending the feed with http://fulltext/
- Having used many alternatives including feedly that is mentioned below, I highly recommend inoreader.

Let’s take this opportunity to list out your favourite RSS websites. Let us know what all are your favourites.
- The Verge is a cool website with RSS
- I like https://medium.com/feed/@doctorow and https://www.techdirt.com/feed/
  https://www.weather.gov has good local weather if you want that in your RSS feed
  
  https://www.weather.gov has good local weather if you want that in your RSS feed
  How do you get an RSS feed for your local weather?
  
  Tech dirt isn’t adding for some reason
- https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-find-rss-feed-url/
  I found this page pretty useful. It turns out WordPress does rss by default and a lot of websites are built on it. So there's a good chance if a website doesn't advertise if it has an rss feed available there will still be one at url.com/feed
- I like using kill-the-newsletter.com to turn email newsletters into an RSS feed rather than filling up my email inbox
- Here are a few TTRPG sites with RSS that I subscribe to
  The Alexandrian
  The Monsters Know What They’re Doing
  Dicebreaker
  Sly Flourish
  I also like Autosport for F1 news
- Yeah, I tried doing this a while ago but got frustrated at how difficult it was to find good RSS feeds. I ended up using it mostly for local news and not much else.
  
  Firefox has addons that can help: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/get-rss-feed-url/reviews/
  safari, chrome etc also have them
  
  This is a tricky problem to solve for sure. I've been battling it for a while myself.
- I've been using Inoreader for a couple of years and it's just perfect. I was using Feedly before this, but Ino was just better at the time.

Over reliance on algorhythms has degraded the user experience to the point that the average user is drowning in ragebait and extremist politics, because they drive up engagement
People on Reddit, a vote based platform, used to say this all the time and the front page was filled with ragebait.
Even here, sort by hot or top and most of it is anti-reddit/meta/twitter/capitalism memes or infuriating news articles.
Go back further, what hits the front page of large newspapers? Not puppies, that's for sure.
At some point we have to stop blaming "the algorithm" and recognize that it's human behaviour to seek out ragebait that trains the algorithms. Only way to remove ragebait from algorithmic or voter based platforms is to retrain the way we seek content really.
- Because it makes you think and gives you the opportunity to assess your own moral and ethical values. Reading things that you agree with is passive. Lots of people prefer things they can interact with
- This is what I pretty much said - algorithms are amplifying already existing negative trends, and those who control them design the user experience for maximum engagement at the cost of the user's mental wellbeing. We can shrug our shoulders and say "that's just human nature" which does nothing to improve the situation, or we can create our own experience and "retrain the way we seek content" as you put it.
  
  Right, but what I mean is it's not just "algorithms" though, and tailoring your feed to be the top of reddit or lemmy (or other voter based platform) isn't necessarily going to fix the ragebait issue. My comment wasn't meant to disagree with your post, more of an addition.

Lemmy supports RSS! You can use it to subscribe to communities and, even better, your inbox! Easy way to be notified of replies/dms/etc.
- This is especially wonderful if you have multiple Lenny accounts, all your inboxes in one place!

Wow I've been doing this for years and my kids thought I was a dinosaur. Is it cool again?
- It is cool again. (from another dinosaur)
  
  Super cool
- It's always been cool, but a lot of people gave it up due to lack of good quality tools and content sites actively working against it. Glad to see the community is still alive and trying to get back to it.
  
  Well when I first started, a lot of the smaller news outlets didn't support rss but I actually wrote some scraper scripts for the ones that interested me. Then there was kind of a golden age where everyone had rss. And then yeah, they started hiding everything behind paywalls and what not. So today, I get as much news as I can through rss and some extra paid content through an Apple News+ subscription. If only the latter allowed you to rss its channels, but it looks pretty locked down.

Shameless plug: I made a magazine, @rss, for RSS. It has approximately zero content right now but I'd love for people to start using it to exchange ideas, comments, and questions about feeds.
- That's @RSS, for those who might want to look it up (I really wish kbin would show posters' instances more clearly). Subscribed!
- Thanks, this is useful.

Taking the opportunity to plug my new favorite RSS app, Feeder. I found it recently from another Lemmy user. It's FOSS, no ads, beautiful, and has lots of features. Here it is on Google Play and F-Droid.
- Thanks, Nunti has been a pain in the ass for a while now and I've been looking to switch

This is how the Reddit “addicts” can get by without Reddit and help generate content elsewhere. Find an interesting article that you’d like to discuss or see other people’s opinion on in your RSS feed? Post it to kbin or Lemmy (or whatever you use).
I completely forgot RSS was a thing even though I’m kinda old. Just got the Feeder app on iOS and added a bunch of feeds I’m interested in. Now I can scroll through and it’s kinda like browsing Reddit but without the comments section.

My problem with rss is that I can't get rss feeds from 10 different websites and curate them into a single feed. The services I looked at charged out the ass for this and I couldn't find a program to do it locally.
I don't want to subscribe to someone else's feed.
- Feedly
- FreshRSS or Tiny Tiny RSS are just a couple of self hosted options. I just setup FreshRSS last week and am using FeedMe app on Android to read my feeds.
  My only issue so far is not every site has RSS feeds anymore. I tried RSS-Bridge in docker, but had issues figuring out how to enable the bridges, the documentation for it isn't great.
  
  Since you seem technical enough to use docker you should look at n8n. I've been using it the past few months for odds and ends and I love it so much.
  You could totally set up an incoming webhook and then process anything you like in between and format it as an RSS feed going out.
  
  I've been loving FreshRSS, I was able to ditch Feedly because of it.
- Someone put me onto Inoreader and I've found it excellent.
- Newsblur is pretty decent, and has (or atleast used to - I've not checked) have a free version (likely limited in number of feeds). I pay and is $36 a year.
  You can organise feeds from various sites into folders - clicking the folder will give a view that combines the different feeds into one.
  Android app is pretty decent too.
  https://www.newsblur.com/
- I use an app called feeder. It works really well and is FOSS.
- @lemmy.link uses RSS repost bots, so I guess you can just let Lemmy be your RSS aggregator.

Reeder for iOS is a great app. I think one of the most minimal and beautiful apps. It’s paid though.
- Came here to big up Reeder! You can switch on Bionic Reading too which is a game changer for us dyslexics and tbh all apps ought to have it
- NetNewsWire is also great and it's free
- Reeder is great. Well worth the $5.
- Agree that Reeder is excellent!
- Is it better than Inoreader? I've been trying to find a good IOS RSS reader and cannot find one I like, Inoreader is the closest but it's only decent.
  
  They look similarly minimalist. I like reeder because it really boils thing down to the essential.

One could also add SubReddits as RSS feeds. I wonder if we can do that for Lemmy also
- You can! There is a RSS logo you can click on when you’re on the desktop version on Lemmy.

If you want to keep up to date with your feeds on multiple platforms you might consider a self hosted solution like freeRSS or a website like theoldreader.com I use the ladder but in the last few days I noticed an increase in ads which might indicate that it's time for a change

I've actually created a Lemmy instance (Lemmy.link) to bridge the gap between RSS feeds and Lemmy. We have 36 communities (topics) you can subscribe to from your home instance. Each community has the RSS sources listed in the "Feeds" section of the community sidebar. I'm always open to feedback on new community ideas or how to make it better. Currently I'm working on having the bot parse the article and ignore if it is an ad or sponsored and also including the channel name in the subject line for YouTube sources. Eventually I'd also like to train a model on which topics don't receive upvotes or comments and attempt to ignore them for a better signal:noise ratio.
- Was planning on doing something similar. I think adding more topics like science and specific sports could be useful.
  Edit: My scrolling cut off half the list of communities. Looks like you already have those.

I've been using RSS for a decade or more--and love it. I currently have over 100 subscriptions at Feedly.com, which is my current favorite all-platform reader.
- Love feedly - been using it since Google Reader was discontinued
  
  That's exactly when I found it as well... 👍

I have a list of all my subreddits as RSS feeds. Did some text transforming to add the RSS links and used an OPML generator to make the file. I was not adding 600+ subreddits individually, lol.
I've collected loads of RSS feeds, from Congress (bills and other happenings, etc.) to the NY Times, and Science Daily with their topic feeds. GitHub has a few OPML files, though some of the feeds are out of date. Tumblr used to have a way to export your followed blogs as OPML, but that broke at some point in 2020. Mastodon has RSS feeds for every profile, but it's a pain to collect, as their CSV export outputs the address in the wrong format for the feed.
I use Feedbro on Firefox, and QuiteRSS & RSS Owlnix on my Windows desktop. I also use Podcast Addict on my phone for my podcasts and keep a copy of the OPML file in my RSS reader as backup.

RSS is the best -- I've been self hosting a personal tt-rss server since the time google reader went down and never looked back when it comes to "a place to scroll and get all kinds of great info/news/entertainment/etc" and for the most part even a lot of the "big places" still support it, or you an use services like https://morss.it/ to generate them.

I really don't follow any news website but I want to try this. So are there any Android apps which would suggest me some RSS feeds based on my interests?
Actually only news feed I can kind followed for a while was Google Discover. It would somehow(obviously with the data it stole frok me) would curate me articles which grab my interest. I wonder if there is any app like Google Discover but FOSS or at least privacy oriented.

Youtube has rss feeds as well, but nowadays they're hidden in the page source (you can just search for rss in the source)
Works for streamers as well, but the rss feed with trigger twice. Once for when they schedule the stream, and once for when the stream ends.
- I use mPage with youtube and comic subscription. Just seeing a new, virgin blue link is nice and I only have to visit onr site.

Anyone got a good recommendation for Firefox?
- Inoreader is web based RSS aggregator.
- Feedbro is a very good RSS reader. It installs as an extension to Firefox.

I’ve been using Thunderbird for programming.dev feeds. I don’t know if there’s anything better but it works for me
- Haha just saw this from lemmy

The majority of my information comes from RSS feeds. However, I depend on Lemmy (formerly I depended on Reddit) for the things that pop up in an area of interest that I might other wise have missed.

Serious question. Why don’t sites stop providing a feed and force users to their website to get ads showing?
- A lot of sites will show an article stub in the feed, then make you go to the full site to read the whole thing.

I don't know anything about RSS. Can someone point me in the right direction to start?
- In a nutshell, an RSS feed reader will aggregate any articles/posts from sites you choose. I pull all my local news and a subreddit into my reader.

Been a Feedly user for years and I love it. I browse it throughout the day.

Thank you for this YSK post, I've set up my first reader/feed and think this will be a nice value-added system since ditching Reddit a few weeks back. Especially in concert with Lemmy!

I'd like to see RSS feeds as communitys/magazines.

I like FeedMe (on Android). It's really versatile to customise the UX to your liking.

Newsblur is my favorite. It's paid, but I find the subscription fee reasonable.
Has some of the old social features of gReader, but it's not that active.

I did this a few days ago and fucked up. do not add sites that requires a paid subscription. lol

106 comments