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.
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.
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
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.)
Never stopped using it.
By the way, how to RSS your lemmy communities?
That would be something supported by the Lemmy (or kbin/mastodon/whatever) software. A quick look at the documentation doesn’t indicate it’s a supported view but I can’t imagine it’d be hard to implement.
It’d probably be on a per community basis. If it’s an unauthenticated request there’d be no way to immediately get subscribed communities. I’m not sure if authenticated RSS is a thing or not.
Thanks for the answer!
There’s an RSS tag on instances and communities, at least when looking at it via a web browser. Is at an indiviual instance or community level, though - as far as I know you can’t export your subscribed communities to link them all to an RSS reader in one go.
At least, there is for sh.itjust.works, dunno about other instances. See above blue smudge below.
Ah, thanks! I only used lemmy via app so far.
You should not assume that the google trend for RSS is linked to the popularity of RSS feeds. Nowadays, techies uses the term, but it is somewhat hidden for a lot of people through aggregation services and other names (atom, feed, etc.).
Contrary to the trend, there’s been a handful of people moving back to decentralized sites that supports it, and a lot of big sites never stopped supporting it. And it gets advertised as an alternative, even if not under the “rss” name.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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 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
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 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.
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.
Who the fuck Google searches for “RSS”?
I’ve done it.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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?
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
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.
People switched to twitter, that seems to be wearing off…
Yup, Twitter was the awesome condensed RSS alternative with great short summaries by necessity that melted down.
