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.
Who the fuck Google searches for “RSS”?
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?
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.
I’ve done it.
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 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.
you can use it to subscribe to youtube, odysee, peertube, podcasts, without an account. i use feedbro to get the youtube rss easy but lately i use freetube.
Ars Technica, BBC and Reuters are big enough that you may find a channel of your liking, that was my starting point.
What are your interests?
Thanks for replying. Tech, Linux, selfhosting, FOSS, motorcycles, mechanical work, home improvement, tools, shop type things.
The OPML I have on my phone is not as complete as the one on my PC, let me get back at you when I can and I’ll share some feeds for tech, Linux and FOSS.
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.
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.
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/
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!
Never stopped using it.
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]
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.
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
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.
Blame? Fuck Facebook, the less relevant it is the better.
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.
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.
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 only algorithm I want is the classic “Sort by Magic.”
What’s that?
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
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!
also check out miniflux
Newsblur also does something similar and is self-hostable.
deleted by creator
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 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.
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 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
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.
I keep hearing about Google being part of the downfall but I honestly never heard of Google Reader until long after it got closed down. How was this different than other RSS readers?
Since it was completely server-hosted it was incredibly fast. You’d open it up and boom, everything all up to date. The search was fantastic. (Say what you will about Google but they’ve always been great at search. Very fast and very good results.) The site layout was clean and minimal. It was just a really good implementation. Of course they murdered it.
If you used Gmail in the early days, and ever used something before it, you probably had a moment where you said “wow, this is what email should have been all along”. Reader was the same.
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.
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).
Modern ads aren’t simply bits of text or animated gifs anymore. They’re full tracking platforms that rely on analyzing a person’s usage in order to deliver them targeted ads. It’s much harder to do that over RSS.
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 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.
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.
