this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
853 points (98.5% liked)

Technology

59652 readers
4818 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Whatever the linguistic details, one of the main roles of RSS is to supply directly to you a steady stream of updates from a website. Every new article published on that site is served up in a list that can be interpreted by an RSS reader.

Unfortunately, RSS is no longer how most of us consume "content." (Google famously killed its beloved Google Reader more than a decade ago.) It's now the norm to check social media or the front pages of many different sites to see what's new. But I think RSS still has a place in your life: Especially for those who don't want to miss anything or have algorithms choosing what they read, it remains one of the best ways to navigate the internet. Here's a primer on what RSS can (still!) do for you, and how to get started with it, even in this late era of online existence.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Blackmist 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I seem to remember RSS's main issue being not really being able to tell "recent" from "popular".

Showed a whole lot of nothing much, and not very much of the stuff you wanted to see.

[–] Corgana@startrek.website 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Hah, I consider non-algorithmic sorting to be RSS' killer feature. There are a lot of fantastic stories that get published every week that are too dry, too complex, or just plan too accurate and non-sensationalized to get noticed by social media algorithms.

[–] realitista@lemmy.world 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It does tend to sort by recent, but to me that's its strength. It makes no effort to curate the feed, it gives me all the articles from the sources I choose in order and that's it. So while I still use Lemmy for the "popular", RSS tends to deliver me deep niche content that may not be popular but is very interesting to me.

And also so much content is overlooked by sites like Reddit and Lemmy, that often it is stuff that's popular if I post it, but no one's gotten to it yet. It tends to be more up to date because you don't have to wait for things to get voted to the front page