- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.
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.
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.
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