Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#171

Post by 6510 » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 7:56 AM UTC

MattyRad wrote: post #161

bibanez wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like your reasoning. The only problem I see is that if everyone did what you propose, we wouldn't have Hacker News at all (upvotes, in the end, must come from somewhere). So from a Kantian ethical point of view, it doesn't really work. There ought to be a better solution. But on a personal level, I wholeheartedly agree

I take your point. But note that I'm here upvoting and commenting still! I saw the link to this article in my RSS feed, and I took the time to open a browser, find the link, and comment because RSS adoption is something that I genuinely want to have a conversation about. Which means that with RSS, you can still be a part of the community, you just won't reflexively upvote or spend time in the comments section.

Comment sections should have their own feed. Just like sub forums, users and search queries. Each comment could have its own feed of replies.

Sometimes an uninteresting website has a very interesting article. This is specially great for supper niche stuff. An empty feed should not draw much attention in a reader. The single comment posted years later could be really useful.

There is also https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#ltcommentsgtSub...

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#172

Post by lormayna » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 9:51 AM UTC

Is there a way to get FB posts or FB groups articles to RSS? The only reason why I am still using FB is following some people in a very specific fields or groups.

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#173

Post by firexcy » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 10:35 AM UTC

I reduced my twitter consumption to nearly zero by simply subscribing to accounts I followed via RSS. I was immediately stunned by how noisy some pundits are and how their posts are laughably low-quality vis-a-vis posts from decent feeds like HN.

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#174

Post by kevincox » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 11:05 AM UTC

noveltyaccount wrote: post #106

superkuh wrote: post #100

HN is a great place to gather RSS feeds. Any time there's an interesting site I always look for them. These days I usually see articles that appear on the HN front page a day or so before they hit HN. But HN isn't the only place I practice this. Back in the 2010s it was obvious reddit was going under so I did the same there till 2015. I have 1000+ RSS feeds now and very little need for news aggregators on the day to…

Good grief I struggle to keep up with eight feeds in my RSS reader!

I think it depends on the type of feeds you subscribe to. Some big news sites have multiple posts an hour whereas many personal blogs don't post in the average month.

Personally I do more of the latter and probably get less than 10 new items a day (and 3 of those tend to be comics which are quick to read over breakfast).

Often the higher-volume feeds that I subscribe to are filtered by author or category to focus on what I am really interested in.

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#175

Post by leetnewb » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 11:10 AM UTC

aftergibson wrote: post #155

I find RSS has the same problem as to do lists for me. It all gets too much and I dump it. Another inbox to manage where it's a roll of the dice if I get any value or find anything interesting. Certainly beats other news sources but I think I'd prefer to opt into the news stream when I'm in the right headspace and not just to feel "on top of" my feeds. Email is loud enough.

I found this reader recently that you might find meets your consumption preference: https://github.com/georgemandis/bubo-rss

The author discusses the design here: https://george.mand.is/2019/11/introducing-bubo-rss-an-absur...

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#176

Post by kevincox » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 11:10 AM UTC

variant wrote: post #83

NoboruWataya wrote: post #52

Does anyone use (or know of) software that follows RSS feeds and sends you a single daily/weekly/whatever digest with links to all new posts? TinyTinyRSS has this functionality which I am currently using but it's not very pretty or configurable - I'm wondering if there is anything else that I could look into.

Doesn't do a digest (at least not that I'm aware of), but rss2email[1] does a good job of aggregating feed updates into your email inbox. [1] https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email

Or if course you can filter the messages into a folder to browse when you have some downtime. For example I have a "Not Important" folder in my email client that doesn't notify but it's always synced to my phone so that I can read some news when I have a spare moment.

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#177

Post by kevincox » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 11:16 AM UTC

aendruk wrote: post #162

Instagram actively fights to shut down this kind of access. Any solution you find that works now will soon be killed. I’ve given up. The result is that I simply don’t get to see what my friends and family post there anymore.

This is where I am at too. I've told my friends that if they want me to see what they post they need to use something that isn't so actively user-hostile. Even Facebook will at least email me when selected friends post something.

That being said I'm not sure if there is a great website to recommend for private sharing. Mastodon is maybe the best but I'm not sure I am a huge fan of the "only short messages" medium.

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#178

Post by kevincox » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 11:22 AM UTC

aftergibson wrote: post #155

I find RSS has the same problem as to do lists for me. It all gets too much and I dump it. Another inbox to manage where it's a roll of the dice if I get any value or find anything interesting. Certainly beats other news sources but I think I'd prefer to opt into the news stream when I'm in the right headspace and not just to feel "on top of" my feeds. Email is loud enough.

I think anything like this requires some curation. I regularly unsubscribe from feeds that aren't pulling their weight. This seems very similar to how you would unfollow and block people on Twitter to keep your feed interesting.

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#179

Post by kevincox » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 11:26 AM UTC

johnsbrayton wrote: post #90

jonwinstanley wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't someone try to start a JSON based RSS standard a while back?

JSON Feed - https://www.jsonfeed.org/

There is nothing wrong with JSON Feed but IMHO it doesn't add enoiover Atom to justify adding a new format into the mix.

That being said the reader I wrote supports it because why not.

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#180

Post by Semaphor » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 12:23 PM UTC

remram wrote: post #133

Semaphor wrote: post #12

I've been self hosting TT-RSS since Newsblut raised prices some years ago (which was what I switched to when Google Reader closed). My list simply grew over time. Whenever I see an interesting article (doesn't matter where, here, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook) I check if the others are interesting, and if so, I subscribe. Almost everything worth reading has a feed.

Switched from TT-RSS to FreshRSS recently, mostly because I don't want to hack on PHP code. It's a good alternative, also light weight.

Thought I might as well try it again. While it wastes more space than TT-RSS, it’s good enough, and everything else looks nice and works faster, so I switched to FreshRSS as well now ;)