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.
If you want to keep up to date with your feeds on multiple platforms you might consider a self hosted solution like freeRSS or a website like theoldreader.com I use the ladder but in the last few days I noticed an increase in ads which might indicate that it’s time for a change
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.
I did this a few days ago and fucked up. do not add sites that requires a paid subscription. lol
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.
Youtube has rss feeds as well, but nowadays they’re hidden in the page source (you can just search for rss in the source)
Works for streamers as well, but the rss feed with trigger twice. Once for when they schedule the stream, and once for when the stream ends.
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I use mPage with youtube and comic subscription. Just seeing a new, virgin blue link is nice and I only have to visit onr site.
My problem with rss is that I can’t get rss feeds from 10 different websites and curate them into a single feed. The services I looked at charged out the ass for this and I couldn’t find a program to do it locally.
I don’t want to subscribe to someone else’s feed.
@lemmy.link uses RSS repost bots, so I guess you can just let Lemmy be your RSS aggregator.
Someone put me onto Inoreader and I’ve found it excellent.
Newsblur is pretty decent, and has (or atleast used to - I’ve not checked) have a free version (likely limited in number of feeds). I pay and is $36 a year.
You can organise feeds from various sites into folders - clicking the folder will give a view that combines the different feeds into one.
Android app is pretty decent too.
FreshRSS or Tiny Tiny RSS are just a couple of self hosted options. I just setup FreshRSS last week and am using FeedMe app on Android to read my feeds.
My only issue so far is not every site has RSS feeds anymore. I tried RSS-Bridge in docker, but had issues figuring out how to enable the bridges, the documentation for it isn’t great.
Since you seem technical enough to use docker you should look at n8n. I’ve been using it the past few months for odds and ends and I love it so much.
You could totally set up an incoming webhook and then process anything you like in between and format it as an RSS feed going out.
Not OP but thanks for bringing n8n to my attention, wasn’t aware of it. At a glance it seems similar to Node-RED but leaning more heavily towards the IFTTT/Zapier side of things with tighter integrations, definitely an interesting project.
I’ve been loving FreshRSS, I was able to ditch Feedly because of it.
Feedly
I use an app called feeder. It works really well and is FOSS.
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!
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.
How does one do this? Because I can think of a few ideas for this.
Outlook and Thunderbirds both have embedded RSS readers.
I’m really liking the app Read You on Android, but there are many others. Pretty much any news site or blog or something you can add it by URL. Sometimes you need to add /rss to the end of it.
Try inoreader and subscribe to sites you need + set up some filters to weed out bad stuff. The latter is unfortunately a premium option, but worth those a few $.
Just imagine - why exactly do you need to learn about yet another case of [todler/infant/baby/child] [killed/abused] across the ocean?
Just download an RSS reader - there are mobile ones like feedly, and in-browser ones Like FeedBro for Firefox. After that, find an RSS feed for your site, and add it to your reader
I’ve had a good experience with Feedly. they have a free and paid tier. I use the free one, and even keep up with one subreddit that won’t be migrating. I also added my local news websites which eliminated a need for Facebook.
Love Feedbro. Got it running on a server to post Twitter posts into my Discord server as it still seems to work seemlessly with Twitter
Twitter has RSS feeds? More importantly, Feedbro can still access them?
Yeah just add a feed in Feedbro and the URL just needs to be the URL of the Twitter profile and it will pick it up. It broke during Musk’s little bitch fit the other day but it’s working again now. So much better than actually having to use Twitter!
I’d like to see RSS feeds as communitys/magazines.
Shameless plug: I made a magazine, @rss, for RSS. It has approximately zero content right now but I’d love for people to start using it to exchange ideas, comments, and questions about feeds.
Thanks, this is useful.
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.
I’ve actually created a Lemmy instance (Lemmy.link) to bridge the gap between RSS feeds and Lemmy. We have 36 communities (topics) you can subscribe to from your home instance. Each community has the RSS sources listed in the “Feeds” section of the community sidebar. I’m always open to feedback on new community ideas or how to make it better. Currently I’m working on having the bot parse the article and ignore if it is an ad or sponsored and also including the channel name in the subject line for YouTube sources. Eventually I’d also like to train a model on which topics don’t receive upvotes or comments and attempt to ignore them for a better signal:noise ratio.
Was planning on doing something similar. I think adding more topics like science and specific sports could be useful.
Edit: My scrolling cut off half the list of communities. Looks like you already have those.
I like FeedMe (on Android). It’s really versatile to customise the UX to your liking.
Been a Feedly user for years and I love it. I browse it throughout the day.
