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.
You must log in or register to comment.
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.)
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.
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.
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!
Newsblur also does something similar and is self-hostable.
also check out miniflux
That sounds awesome! Any chance you’d be willing to share your code?
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.
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.
Clickbait is obviously an issue with many media outlets but given that you curate your RSS feeds you can just dump them. Once reddit died I made plenty of changes to my media diet. It left me with way less sources but I’m certain all I lost was low quality reporting and other kinds of outrage bait.
I’ll give you a raw firehose of content.
No homo.
Yes homo make it really gay
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.
Individual/custom feeds would be awesome here. If I remember correctly from github, they are coming.
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 only algorithm I want is the classic “Sort by Magic.”
What’s that?
Wasn’t that how YouTube used to work tho? Still I think it’s better discovering new channels, but that makes it harder for the new users I suppose
Funny you need YouTube. I have been rediscovering the “Subscriptions” tab recently. It’s a chronological view (newest first) of all Channels I am subscribed to, but I actually haven’t used it for years.
I’ve gotten used to the YouTube algorithm, going to the homepage and just finding whatever seemingly interesting videos YouTube suggests to me. However recently, YouTube made the strange decision to disable the homepage for people who disable Watch History. Now my YouTube homepage is entirely empty.
Anyway, going to the subscription tab it’s just a massive collection of random channels I’ve subscribed to over the years. It’s too messy to keep my interest, and I’ve actually been using YouTube less.
Same here, I have removed the home page (using ReVanced) so it automatically loads my subscriptions, as I found those has far better videos than my home feed at all. Homepage has really died, I keep getting the same videos I already watched, some obscure 39 views video keep annoying me and because I use YouTube music I also get recommended music, except they have like 100 views. It’s just so terrible.
I think YouTube has been disabling the homepage, so you are more intrigued to enable it. But it really just makes your and my lives easier. Either way it’s the only way to really enjoy the videos nowadays. Hopefully another platform comes along, but that hasn’t happened at all in over 20 years
That’s the thing, I personally liked the YouTube homepage! Even with watch history disabled, I found it gave me decent mix of recommendations based on my region, subscriptions and Liked videos. I know many people dislike the YouTube algorithm but it actually worked well for me.
Now that YouTube has disabled my homepage (held hostage unless I turn on Watch History), I am far less inclined to go on YouTube and watch random videos. Which is probably a good thing for me, let’s be honest. On the other hand I don’t know what YouTube wanted to achieve with this move. I find it hilarious that my homepage is empty now by Google’s own choice.
And you know what? The channels today are super sensational when it comes to their titles and thumbnails like it’s always about a curiosity gap or some extreme headline that makes you annoyed and I’m honestly over it. It’s just so hard to find good channels that are genuinely entertaining and don’t employ any of these. Honestly I’d go back to 2013 YouTube, it was far better
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.
The way I like it. The showRSS feed is beautiful after using Google Home feed for so long. I’ll never go back to ads and Google trying to sell me pixel products and reviews every day
RSS was peak internet. All been downhill since then.
*peak, not weak.
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 @[email protected]
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.
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?
no, been a freebie user since Google Readers died and honestly, for the way I use it, to pop on and scroll through the feed then clicking on some articles? I’ve never felt limited or like I needed to pay to do anything.
Same thing for me as well, I haven’t felt limited by anything in the free version. It’s great for things like hackernews and webcomics.
I am Feedly user as well, but use the FeedMe app on Android. I prefer that app over the Feedly one, it’s free, and I can add as many categories as I want whereas Feedly limits it to three or so in the free version :)
Oh thanks for the tip. I’ll give Feedme a try
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.
You wouldn’t include any terminology to narrow your search down? Just “RSS” seems overly broad, yeah?
please correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that this graph included any search with RSS in your search query. Otherwise it works be useless as people rarely search for something with just a single word.
the subset of those who do not use a proper search engine who want to know what a RSS is.
Beyond that, though, who the fuck would use Google’s search popularity as a metric for the popularity of a technology. Those who use it aren’t searching for it all the time. OP is dumb.
who the fuck would use Google’s search popularity as a metric for the popularity of a technology
that’s been a leading indicator of popularity for a long time now.
Why would that be a leading indicator? If anything those that use it are far less likely to Google it.
Search popularity is something like the first derivation (read: change in) popularity of a technology.
Calling people dumb is ableist.
Is there an alternative to saying somebody or something is dumb? Or that a choice was dumb? Genuinely asking. It just seems like it’s all ableist all the way down at that point, but I’ve not heard of dumb being called ableist before so am interested if there’s a better alternative? Short-sighted? Uninformed?
I feel like, at least in this context, it’s unnecessary.
If your in a submarine and OP tries to open the external hatch while submerged, sure call him dumb. If op leaves your baby in a scorpion pit because he thought it’d make the child gain super powers, dumb.
If, however, OP thinks that Google is a valid metric to gage how popular something is. “I disagree with using this as a valid metric and here’s the reasons why.”
No need to call him dumb. This post didn’t hurt or impact you personally. It’s just the original guy who called him dumb really doesn’t like google. Which is fine. Not gonna call him dumb for using duck duck go.
I agree, I don’t think using Google as an indicator of trends is wrong. I was just asking about why it is ableist is all :)
Dyslectics trying to do their taxes?
I’ve done 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
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.
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.
I miss RSS.
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.
For me it has to do with this
- I want a feed that updates based on my subscription
- That subscription content could be anything, blog posts, updates on a Wikipedia page (to keep up to date with a news story that is out of the limelight), or get updated with a XKCD comic
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 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.
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.
