4 ms·

For anyone not using rss and wondering whether to get into it and how, this is what worked for me over the past year. I used to have 4-6 sites I would check re

by graeme 3y ago

For anyone not using rss and wondering whether to get into it and how, this is what worked for me over the past year. I used to have 4-6 sites I would check regularly. A couple occasionally had a news update article I liked reading. A couple were “firehose” sites for a hobby which produced 4-20 articles per day. Hard to keep up with on web without feeling overwhelmed. I got NetNewsWire which has a good sync system across machines. Then I put the occasional news articles in one folder and the firehose feeds in another. (If a site has no obvious rss, paste in the homepage. NetNewsWire seems to figure it out) It now takes 2-3 min per day to look over the firehouses. Can scan, read the ones I want, mark the rest as done. For the news/essay sites, no longer any need to check a site periodically to see “is there an update?” It all just comes in when published. In a world where habit transformation is hard, this one stuck. Consistently has led me to read more of the stuff I wanted to keep up with, while spending less time and energy around actually finding it.

jwells89 3y ago
NetNewsWire is excellent. Clean, responsive, blends into the desktop, and doesn't have memory leak issues like so many macOS RSS readers do. I wish all software could be like it. https://netnewswire.com/ https://netnewswire.com/
- nntwozz 3y ago
  It just turned 21, time flies! https://netnewswire.blog/2024/02/11/netnewswire-turns.html https://netnewswire.blog/2024/02/11/netnewswire-turns.html
ents 3y ago
Appreciate the mini-guide here, inspired me to give nnw and rss in general a place in my day again rather than just checking the sites manually.
- graeme 3y ago
  Glad to help! I should have added I started light, then added in some more stuff once I had a working system. I had tried RSS years ago and my feed then was unwieldy enough I never checked it. This attempt is smaller and stuck
  - 6510 3y ago
    I was curious what would happen if you add many. Turns out that around 1000-3000 feeds the chaos starts to self-organize. I have 30 000+ subscriptions now and it's just wonderful. Beyond the sweet spot you cant not filter out topics covered by everyone. You are aware Tucker interviewed Vladimir, there is Genocide in Gaza, Bidden has nothing interesting to say anymore. You just cant have tens of thousands of articles about David Bowie dying. You know that already. And then.... when you've silenced the echo what remains is all the other things that happened in the world, the small, the unique, the rare, the interesting... the real www? The funniest thing was businesinsider: They echo a lot but their titles are so descriptive they hit pretty much every filter I've created. That what remains is actually interesting. I think something like 0.01%! The next website with its "You will be angry when you find out about this!" articles must be extremely fascinating 100% of the time (this never happened) to avoid getting blacklisted. I do quests like find feeds for press releases for all fortune 500 companies. Best one thus far was to take a list of all countries and find 1-5 English news feeds for each. Turns out many have an English version of the national news that absolutely no one reads. Who is to say that if you have a few million people, nothing interesting happens there? Their official stance on events on the other side of the world is often so free from bias it is almost boring. A war becomes just a war without good or bad guys. Whatever government websites publish is usually worth reading the headline of. HN is a good website but the curated list of headlines on the front page requires the topic to appeal to the audience, the audience isn't as broad as other websites but it's a serious limitation compared to that what you find interesting. If HN was to one day decided to force onto the front page each new book about eating bugs there is probably one guy out there excited about it. Then comes breeding bugs and then growing plants to feed to your bugs... Our guy would be thrilled? Sadly for him it cant happen. It's unthinkable. Facebook is actively filtering out the things I want to read. lol? Twitter is the mega echo chamber. Reddit echo's and filters and is littered with low effort commentary. Subs are dominated by majority perspective. Wikipedia is a trench war. But what were we thinking? Why should other people be held responsible for what you read and write? There is also the angle of programmers trying not to be political or activists. Over the years the sum of little crumbs of avoiding politics or activism adds up to enshitification. When Musk fired so many at Twitter people talked about how difficult it is to get the posts onto everyones feed. Meanwhile my crappy laptop and my crappy internet over my crappy wifi can deal with hundreds of thousands of feeds, millions. I can read Nazi's, Maoists, Israeli's, religious fanatics, hackers, eugenicists without them making an effort towards making their thing more palatable to the masses. Non of them are making thousands of accounts in an effort to promote their views. There are no likes, views or upvotes to be purchased. When their new website finds their way into my aggregator (how?) I can get rid of it in a single click.
pests 3y ago
This was my life back with Reader. So strange what my process is like now, so inefficient.
bjoli 3y ago
I bought an old used server with 24 CPU cores way too much RAM. I use it to self host a number of things (torrent box, NAS, unifi controller, DNS server). I recently added freshrss. I love it. It halved my social media use, and it my news paper has feeds for subjects that interest me, meaning most of my internet usage can be found in one place.
rldjbpin 3y ago
recently started using the app and i share a lot of same impressions. i went ahead and checked their github after reading about sync feature here but sadly they currently only support macOS and iOS. personally i am yet to find an app with sync features without requiring self-hosting or freeware account creation. regardless as long as you read on one device it is still possible to have a decent experience.

by graeme 3y ago

jwells89 3y ago

NetNewsWire is excellent. Clean, responsive, blends into the desktop, and doesn't have memory leak issues like so many macOS RSS readers do. I wish all software could be like it. https://netnewswire.com/ https://netnewswire.com/

nntwozz 3y ago
It just turned 21, time flies! https://netnewswire.blog/2024/02/11/netnewswire-turns.html https://netnewswire.blog/2024/02/11/netnewswire-turns.html

ents 3y ago

Appreciate the mini-guide here, inspired me to give nnw and rss in general a place in my day again rather than just checking the sites manually.

graeme 3y ago
Glad to help! I should have added I started light, then added in some more stuff once I had a working system. I had tried RSS years ago and my feed then was unwieldy enough I never checked it. This attempt is smaller and stuck
- 6510 3y ago
  I was curious what would happen if you add many. Turns out that around 1000-3000 feeds the chaos starts to self-organize. I have 30 000+ subscriptions now and it's just wonderful. Beyond the sweet spot you cant not filter out topics covered by everyone. You are aware Tucker interviewed Vladimir, there is Genocide in Gaza, Bidden has nothing interesting to say anymore. You just cant have tens of thousands of articles about David Bowie dying. You know that already. And then.... when you've silenced the echo what remains is all the other things that happened in the world, the small, the unique, the rare, the interesting... the real www? The funniest thing was businesinsider: They echo a lot but their titles are so descriptive they hit pretty much every filter I've created. That what remains is actually interesting. I think something like 0.01%! The next website with its "You will be angry when you find out about this!" articles must be extremely fascinating 100% of the time (this never happened) to avoid getting blacklisted. I do quests like find feeds for press releases for all fortune 500 companies. Best one thus far was to take a list of all countries and find 1-5 English news feeds for each. Turns out many have an English version of the national news that absolutely no one reads. Who is to say that if you have a few million people, nothing interesting happens there? Their official stance on events on the other side of the world is often so free from bias it is almost boring. A war becomes just a war without good or bad guys. Whatever government websites publish is usually worth reading the headline of. HN is a good website but the curated list of headlines on the front page requires the topic to appeal to the audience, the audience isn't as broad as other websites but it's a serious limitation compared to that what you find interesting. If HN was to one day decided to force onto the front page each new book about eating bugs there is probably one guy out there excited about it. Then comes breeding bugs and then growing plants to feed to your bugs... Our guy would be thrilled? Sadly for him it cant happen. It's unthinkable. Facebook is actively filtering out the things I want to read. lol? Twitter is the mega echo chamber. Reddit echo's and filters and is littered with low effort commentary. Subs are dominated by majority perspective. Wikipedia is a trench war. But what were we thinking? Why should other people be held responsible for what you read and write? There is also the angle of programmers trying not to be political or activists. Over the years the sum of little crumbs of avoiding politics or activism adds up to enshitification. When Musk fired so many at Twitter people talked about how difficult it is to get the posts onto everyones feed. Meanwhile my crappy laptop and my crappy internet over my crappy wifi can deal with hundreds of thousands of feeds, millions. I can read Nazi's, Maoists, Israeli's, religious fanatics, hackers, eugenicists without them making an effort towards making their thing more palatable to the masses. Non of them are making thousands of accounts in an effort to promote their views. There are no likes, views or upvotes to be purchased. When their new website finds their way into my aggregator (how?) I can get rid of it in a single click.

pests 3y ago

This was my life back with Reader. So strange what my process is like now, so inefficient.

bjoli 3y ago

I bought an old used server with 24 CPU cores way too much RAM. I use it to self host a number of things (torrent box, NAS, unifi controller, DNS server). I recently added freshrss. I love it. It halved my social media use, and it my news paper has feeds for subjects that interest me, meaning most of my internet usage can be found in one place.

rldjbpin 3y ago

recently started using the app and i share a lot of same impressions. i went ahead and checked their github after reading about sync feature here but sadly they currently only support macOS and iOS. personally i am yet to find an app with sync features without requiring self-hosting or freeware account creation. regardless as long as you read on one device it is still possible to have a decent experience.