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> RSS is dead, he repeats endlessly throughout the book.[...] It's profoundly weird to read RSS's obituary as a person who checks her very-much-still-alive feed reader several times a day to get everything from cryptocurrency news to dinner ideas, and who rarely encounters a website that doesn't provide a functional feed.
[1] https://www.citationneeded.news/review-read-write-own-by-chr...
Twitter addresses a bunch of the downsides of RSS that were listed. The author's criticism of Twitter seems to be that it is too easy for people to use, that it is too helpful in finding you things to read, and that if offers a way to reply to posts. These seem like a net benefit to me and if you don't want to see replies then don't click into a tweet.
RSS is great and I can't imagine what my life would've been if I were to scan the news feeds on each individual site that I have included in my RSS feed. However, the text rendering feature is rather useless for the resources that are greedy for views, clicks and other analytics, as they simply truncate the body of the article, leaving you no choice but to open the original url to read the rest of it. For my use case…
I could not be happier with my self hosted FreshRSS. It's a major way i stay in touch without having to doom scroll
RSS is great and I can't imagine what my life would've been if I were to scan the news feeds on each individual site that I have included in my RSS feed. However, the text rendering feature is rather useless for the resources that are greedy for views, clicks and other analytics, as they simply truncate the body of the article, leaving you no choice but to open the original url to read the rest of it. For my use case…
Inoreader has a 'Load Full Content' button above every (shortened) feed item. It retrieves the original in full & displays it in clear text (no ads and little html formatting).
I discovered the button by accidently clicking it - it's an unintuitive steaming coffee cup.
Yay RSS :) A habit (useful one, i might add) i'll never get rid of :) Quick PSA here: if you ever want (or need) to filter a RSS feed to get rid of adverts, random rants of a certain topic you don't want to read about - there's RSS Bridge [1] which lets you do that. It also provides some bridges that let you subscribe to sites that don't even have an RSS feed via scraping, or YouTube channels or .... It's pretty much…
But RSS Bridge does look very neat!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Appreciate the mini-guide here, inspired me to give nnw and rss in general a place in my day again rather than just checking the sites manually.
Glad to help! I should have added I started light, then added in some more stuff once I had a working system. I had tried RSS years ago and my feed then was unwieldy enough I never checked it. This attempt is smaller and stuck
Beyond the sweet spot you cant not filter out topics covered by everyone. You are aware Tucker interviewed Vladimir, there is Genocide in Gaza, Bidden has nothing interesting to say anymore. You just cant have tens of thousands of articles about David Bowie dying. You know that already.
And then.... when you've silenced the echo what remains is all the other things that happened in the world, the small, the unique, the rare, the interesting... the real www?
The funniest thing was businesinsider: They echo a lot but their titles are so descriptive they hit pretty much every filter I've created. That what remains is actually interesting. I think something like 0.01%! The next website with its "You will be angry when you find out about this!" articles must be extremely fascinating 100% of the time (this never happened) to avoid getting blacklisted.
I do quests like find feeds for press releases for all fortune 500 companies.
Best one thus far was to take a list of all countries and find 1-5 English news feeds for each. Turns out many have an English version of the national news that absolutely no one reads. Who is to say that if you have a few million people, nothing interesting happens there? Their official stance on events on the other side of the world is often so free from bias it is almost boring. A war becomes just a war without good or bad guys.
Whatever government websites publish is usually worth reading the headline of.
HN is a good website but the curated list of headlines on the front page requires the topic to appeal to the audience, the audience isn't as broad as other websites but it's a serious limitation compared to that what you find interesting.
If HN was to one day decided to force onto the front page each new book about eating bugs there is probably one guy out there excited about it. Then comes breeding bugs and then growing plants to feed to your bugs... Our guy would be thrilled? Sadly for him it cant happen. It's unthinkable.
Facebook is actively filtering out the things I want to read. lol?
Twitter is the mega echo chamber.
Reddit echo's and filters and is littered with low effort commentary. Subs are dominated by majority perspective.
Wikipedia is a trench war.
But what were we thinking? Why should other people be held responsible for what you read and write?
There is also the angle of programmers trying not to be political or activists. Over the years the sum of little crumbs of avoiding politics or activism adds up to enshitification.
When Musk fired so many at Twitter people talked about how difficult it is to get the posts onto everyones feed.
Meanwhile my crappy laptop and my crappy internet over my crappy wifi can deal with hundreds of thousands of feeds, millions.
I can read Nazi's, Maoists, Israeli's, religious fanatics, hackers, eugenicists without them making an effort towards making their thing more palatable to the masses. Non of them are making thousands of accounts in an effort to promote their views. There are no likes, views or upvotes to be purchased.
When their new website finds their way into my aggregator (how?) I can get rid of it in a single click.
For anyone not using rss and wondering whether to get into it and how, this is what worked for me over the past year. I used to have 4-6 sites I would check regularly. A couple occasionally had a news update article I liked reading. A couple were “firehose” sites for a hobby which produced 4-20 articles per day. Hard to keep up with on web without feeling overwhelmed. I got NetNewsWire which has a good sync system ac…
I love it. It halved my social media use, and it my news paper has feeds for subjects that interest me, meaning most of my internet usage can be found in one place.
No matter how much people want to proclaim RSS is "dead" there is actually no way to kill it. It is decentralized. No one owns it. If we keep publishing RSS feeds, it still lives.