I’ve seen a lot of people praising RSS feeds over standard news. What benefits does RSS have over normal news sites? Are they more privacy-focused?

What feeds would you recommend for a fellow Lemmy user?

  • kernelle@0d.gs
    28·
    5 days ago

    RSS feeds are a way to aggregate articles from many websites all in one feed. There’s no inherite privacy advantages. The main advantage is you can group many RSS feeds into your preferred categories and see a list of all the articles of your interests, without having to visit each website separately.

    You can start here, a currated list of many feeds. I use Feeder on android and FreshRSS as a self-hosted curration tool but also to connect RSS feeds to services of mine.

    • mr_jaaay@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      I’d add that Social Media kind of took over this role for most regular users, but that having your own RSS feed gives you control of what you follow, instead of ceceeding control to the algorithms most social media uses to put whatever it is they want to put in front of you. So in that aspect, I do think there are also some privacy advantages in not having a central algorithm studying up what news stories and links work for you and how they can manipulate you.

      • kernelle@0d.gs
        1·
        2 days ago

        I’d add that Social Media kind of took over this role for most regular users

        I agree, and that fact scares me tbh. But that’s more of a privacy concern with social media and less an adventage of RSS. Some RSS feeds do require you to click through for the full article, having another opportunity for tracking.

        • mr_jaaay@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          Yeah, but this has been 15 years in the making… So many people say that they ‘don’t use Facebook, it’s just where I get my news…’. Which is how we got into this mess in the first place.

          • kernelle@0d.gs
            2·
            2 days ago

            I’m not judging anyone for not knowing the risks of algorithmic news, and I get how we got there. Journalism as a whole changed by it, so many news articles are engagement bait now. It’s becoming so hard to find uplifting news, that’s why I liked reddit and now lemmy too. People make a genuine effort to find uplifting news.

            Diversification has always been the answer, proven by a second uprising of RSS.