YSK: Use RSS feeds to curate your online experience

Rooty@lemmy.world to You Should Know@lemmy.world – 401 points –

Over reliance on algorithms has degraded the user experience to the point that the average user is drowning in ragebait and extremist politics, because they drive up engagement. Just like a toddler, algorithms don't discriminate between good and bad attention, so everything that gets clicks is thrust forward. Now, you could hope to train the algorithm to show you only postive things, but engagement is engagement and the algorithm curators often engage in rage farming, where your feed is injected with things that are likely to enrage you.

You can avoid this by installing an RSS reader, going to your favorite sites, and manually adding a RSS feed. Now, your reader has things that you manually selected, with the added bonus of having a content pipe free of malicious interference. You can also divide topics in a way that you can avoid certain themes and news until you decide to engage them.

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How does one do this? Because I can think of a few ideas for this.

Just download an RSS reader - there are mobile ones like feedly, and in-browser ones Like FeedBro for Firefox. After that, find an RSS feed for your site, and add it to your reader

Love Feedbro. Got it running on a server to post Twitter posts into my Discord server as it still seems to work seemlessly with Twitter

Twitter has RSS feeds? More importantly, Feedbro can still access them?

Yeah just add a feed in Feedbro and the URL just needs to be the URL of the Twitter profile and it will pick it up. It broke during Musk's little bitch fit the other day but it's working again now. So much better than actually having to use Twitter!

I've had a good experience with Feedly. they have a free and paid tier. I use the free one, and even keep up with one subreddit that won't be migrating. I also added my local news websites which eliminated a need for Facebook.

Try inoreader and subscribe to sites you need + set up some filters to weed out bad stuff. The latter is unfortunately a premium option, but worth those a few $.

Just imagine - why exactly do you need to learn about yet another case of [todler/infant/baby/child] [killed/abused] across the ocean?

I'm really liking the app Read You on Android, but there are many others. Pretty much any news site or blog or something you can add it by URL. Sometimes you need to add /rss to the end of it.