RSS Can Save The Internet

[BoingBoingBoi]

My question is how do you get the normies on board? They make the bulk of the user base of everything, and are a key part of modern site traffic. How are you gonna get them to even bother with RSS?

all hope is lost for the normies. the bottom line is that for anyone who actually gives a shit and wants to be the slightest bit epistemically responsible, something like RSS and other forms of personally curating one's content (like just going to your favorite news sources directly) should be more widely known.

 

[Stock Image Photographer]

the video in the OP is actually not too bad. it's actually great advice: if you dont want to worry about being censored or unpersoned on the internet, build your own website. the great thing about this advice is that unlike some other advice, it doesnt seem to have a time limit, since presumably, no matter what, you'll always be able to make your own website, at least if you have the know-how. i do not. a thread on how to do that might be neat too (the zillions of sites on "how to set up your own website" notwithstanding)

In addition to what everyone else said, Luke Smith, the guy who made the video in the OP, will probably be doing some videos on making your own site soon, and he's pretty good at making this type of tech stuff accessible and understandable.

Is this a Discord clone, or more likely the thing discord copied?

I'm pretty sure Discord came before Riot/Matrix, but Riot is better because it's based on an open standard, it's more decentralized, and it doesn't steal your data and sell it like Discord does.

 

[grumbleBum]

The problem besides publishers gimping it is that the big companies want you to get a specially curated news feed from Google or Facebook where an algorithm picks and chooses what you should be reading. This also makes blacklisting of "problematic" news sites such as Fox News, Breitbart, and especially InfoWars a lot easier as well.

The recommendation algorithms are a significant advantage for Facebook and the like. I’m surprised that the area hasn’t seemed to receive much attention for RSS.

 

[CrunkLord420]

Is this a Discord clone, or more likely the thing discord copied?

The Matrix protocol (which Riot is a client for) is an open source federated protocol that allows for Slack/Discord like features (persistent chat logs, voice/video, rich text) in addition to optional E2E encrypted chat.

The fact it's federated allows you to connect to other Matrix servers (called "homeservers") via your own homeserver. You can think of this like email. Your email provider can ban you, but other email providers can only block you from sending messages to them. You can see me demonstrating the federation feature in my screenshot by viewing the Linux chat hosted on the main official homeserver via the KF server. I never directly connect to the official Matrix homeserver.

 

[PrinceYann]

Now only if KiwiFarms displayed most recent post instead of the OP every time.

Is there an easy way to rss-ify threads

There are scripts out there to convert any page to a feed. With a little URL trick that always redirect to the last page of a thread, it is easy to keep tabs on hundreds of threads (or any page, really). That is what I do.

besides Facebook, Youtube, Reddit

Reddit still offers good RSS feeds, so I would not group it with these others.

 

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fivefilters has a number of useful tools for RSS, including one that proxies worthless 'summary only' rss feeds to contain the actual page content.
https://fivefilters.org/content-only/

 

[Coolio55]

If you're REALLY loony you could probably make a crappy beautifulsoup script to scrape your website of choice. Luckily most forum software includes RSS (As most forum software fits into this spectrum of unpopular self hosted technology)

Also, how is the matrix specification as compared to IRC? I looked into IRC and there's tons of cruft and hacks needed for modern usage (Mostly string stuff but theres a few other cases IIRC) which isn't all that well documented in one single place. How easy would it be to make a simple shit client?

Edit: Also, how low power is the specification? Could I run it on an Amiga or an old DOS pc for instance? (Worst case scenario)

 

[PrinceYann]

If you're REALLY loony you could probably make a crappy beautifulsoup script to scrape your website of choice

That could have almost been me, only I am not loony: mine is not crappy, is not in python and works wonderfully.
Currently, from my 5000 feeds, 80% are scrapped.

Luckily most forum software includes RSS

Even if they do offer some RSS, scrapping is almost always better.

 

[Borax Bozo]

Speaking of feed scrapers, there's a free online one at http://feed43.com/
You pay for more frequent updates, but it's great for notifications of semi-frequently updated sites that don't have a feed of their own.

Someone's attempt at an "Explain the benefits of RSS to normies" site:

You Need Feeds

Want to keep up to date, automatically, easily and for free? You Need Feeds. Read an introduction to feeds, view providers, and you'll be well on the way to your own personal one-stop-shop for all your favourite sites.

www.youneedfeeds.com

Honestly I think the key is going to be partly discoverability. Firefox, Safari and Chrome all need native RSS/ATOM support, or at least be able to recognise them and shunt them to a feed reader like they would handle MAILTO links etc. Have it replace the favorite button if the tag is in the page code..
Social discovery helps, but feed reader sites have that built in already.

 

[Dreamland]

RSS is literally so bad that it's inventor killed himself out of shame, just use a script and wget your sites' frontpages daily.

 

[Splendid]

Linux will never be a good desktop os for normies as long as people keep talking about command line tools like they're a normal thing in the 21st century.

 

[byuu]

Linux will never be a good desktop os for normies as long as people keep talking about command line tools like they're a normal thing in the 21st century.

Linux will win by default when every company has completely turned their desktop OS into a tablet OS.

 

[AnOminous]

Linux will never be a good desktop os for normies as long as people keep talking about command line tools like they're a normal thing in the 21st century.

Good, then it may remain one of the few things not ruined by normies.

 

[Coolio55]

Linux will win by default when every company has completely turned their desktop OS into a tablet OS.

Yeah, but here's a bill nye fast fact.

Red Hat are totally in on this and they control most of the Linux ecosystem so any way you look at it you're getting fucked.

 

[Grotesque Bushes]

Linux will never be a good desktop os for normies as long as people keep talking about command line tools like they're a normal thing in the 21st century.

What a baffling statement, command line tools are a normal thing. They're faster and more powerful for some tasks, and for other you stick with graphic interface tools.
You don't have to fucking use them you mong, and neither will 90% of users, but complaining that people use them is like complaining that people recommend a long arm wrench and wd40 to remove a tight lug, and not blasting it with piss and trying to pry it off with your sphincter.

 

[Splendid]

I do use them, but end users on Linux are often advised to use them to do normal things such as installing or updating software, which is completely unacceptable for normies.
Hell, I've seen end users advised to fucking compile their own software.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Decided to get off my ass and actually run a TTRSS instance, been having fun learning how to hack up the backend and make it do things with web tech I haven't had experience with. Also fun seeing which feeds I used to read as a teenager are still alive, thanks oldreader and your decade of data retention.

Does anyone happen to know if there's a good swiss-army-knife scraper that I can run locally to do feed-creation via simple page scraping and CSS selectors, ala Feed43 etc? Seems like it'd be simple enough to roll my own with beautifulsoup or something but I also feel like there's probably a canned package on github somewhere under a weird name already preconfigured for it and I want to be able to hack on it to learn/make it parse weird formats.

 

[unit2013]

I miss using RSS Feeds I wish they where more popular. It was always a nice at way to see what was going on with websites I used to frequent when i was younger. I guess it went out of style because there are so few platforms now and the Big ones spam push notification at you so there ins't much point. Most normies have no need to go anywhere besides Facebook, Youtube, Reddit ect. so it not like they are bouncing around website to website and need a way to keep in the loop. Sorry if this was a bit rambly but i do think you have the right idea at anyrate

The whole culture of "apps" on your smartphone is what really is constricting the free exchange of ideas right now. There is a larger percentage of people than you'd be comfortable with that never open their browser and think that twitter, facebook, and instagram are the entire internet, anything beyond the dumbed down easy to understand 'apps' is all deep-web spooky hacker internet. We like to think of people as tech savvy now-a-days because everyone has a computer in their pocket but most people are just as unaware of how a computer/The Internet works as they were in the 90s. And companies have an interest in keeping them that way, Apple doesn't want you repairing your phone, because then why would you buy a new one next year. Facebook doesn't want you do anything but being on their website so they can feed you ads and then feed you propaganda that makes you more agreeable to more ads. etc. etc. That's why people like me and you end up in places like this.

It's weird watching parts of culture die around you, but I guess every generation deals with it.

 

[soft kitty]

RSS Feeds? Man that's a blast from the past. I don't think I've ever used one of those since, what, 10 years ago? Interesting idea, I was thinking about setting up one of those for specific YouTube channels but I'm just too damn lazy.

 

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RSS Feeds? Man that's a blast from the past. I don't think I've ever used one of those since, what, 10 years ago? Interesting idea, I was thinking about setting up one of those for specific YouTube channels but I'm just too damn lazy.

YouTube has RSS feeds available from each channel's 'videos' page.