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.
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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.
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.
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/
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
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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.
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!
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
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.
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.
Reeder for iOS is a great app. I think one of the most minimal and beautiful apps. It’s paid though.
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.
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’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.
What are you subbed too? Looking for recomendations.
There’s over a hundred of them! News (NYT, WP, LA Times), Movies & TV, I have custom RSS feeds based on Google Alerts… BoingBoing, Gizmodo…on and on. I believe it’s an official Shit Ton of 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
