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I’m a big fan of Ground News for general news. Their whole goal is to make the bias of the various news sources more transparent to you the reader.

Not exactly what you’re asking, but might be useful.

In 2020, during the pandemic, I decided to reduce my news consumption. My problem wasn’t just the quality/subjects, but also the quantity, so I changed my behaviour and the way I consumed news. I went from using apps like Google News to use a mix of RSS feeds, podcasts, and platforms like this one.

• There are a few sites that write about subjects I like, so I subscribe to their feed. Sometimes I subscribe to the complete feed, sometimes only to a category’s feed. A bit similar to “Google News”, but with the sites I want.
• Hacker News and Reddit (and now Lemmy) is a good source for technology in general and specific areas (in Reddit/Lemmy’s case).
• For regular news (politics, occurrences, etc), I subscribe to 2 weekly podcasts and that gives me the main points of that week (and 2 different point of views).
• Initially I had subscribed to a weekly newsletter digest as some of news sites here have them, but I ended up with the podcasts as I can listen to them while doing something else.

Apps that displayed news and didn’t let me hide them where either removed or replaced. Radio stations also have the habit of having news, so I mostly stream music these days. I also don’t watch news on TV.

I check my feeds and HN/Reddit/Lemmy at least once a day, usually in the morning. Podcasts… it’s when I have the time.

I was using Feeder for RSS feeds, but I wanted something online/cross-platform, so I use Feedly. For podcasts, I only use it on my phone, so AntennaPod is fine.

I don’t need to know everything or need the constant drama. I don’t want hot takes on “breaking news”, to know what someone some random sports dude said or with whom some celebrity went out with. I also don’t want to be always checking the news. It won’t work for everyone, but works well for me.

It never works. I’ve indicated that I don’t want any royal news for as long as I’ve had Google news. It still populates my feed with garbage

Try Hacker News, it’s similar to Reddit/Lemmy (upvotes, downvotes, recursive comments), except more focused on tech news and random interesting articles. You can either read it at https://news.ycombinator.com or use a native client like the ones listed here: https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news

Artifact

A lot of these suggestions are not really alternatives to Google News, as such. That is, OP is asking for something that does better recommendations of content. You could hypothetically, I guess, use RSS feeds as backends for source material, and expose a user-specific derived RSS feed of recommendations, but recommending content is not really what an RSS reader does.

Something directly analogous to Google News would index sites, build a profile on you, and then recommend content that you want to see.

I switched recently to Microsoft alternative Microsoft Start and found it better than Google News.

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I like nunti https://www.f-droid.org/packages/com.nunti/

For me, I use RSS (Feeder is my current fave on Android), Techmeme, Memeorandum, Ground News, Artifact, and News as Facts.

You can use a service like Feedly & Inoreader. They both have Android apps and you can use their web app for desktop.

I personally self host FreshRSS & RSS-Bridge via docker and sync with Fluent Reader (Linux), FeedMe (Android), and Read You (Android). Though self hosting isn’t for everyone.

I used Feedly before defaulting to reddit as sites slowly collapsed RSS functionally.

Curious to know as well, but most of the time I see a couple sites mentioned that I haven’t been impressed with their ability to sift the trade mags and studies I was in it for.