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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2320 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 17, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I also refuse to give the algorithm anything. I'm not even logged in almost anywhere, and I certainly won't use an app.

The best way for me to keep tabs on content I regularly follow is - still, after decades - RSS feeds. You can even "subscribe" to a youtube channel and/or twitter account by just adding it to your RSS reader. And of course it works naturally for blog-style content.

Also, skimming hackernews and curating a list of decent subreddits still works OK for content discovery.

Its funny how one comment tells me it's impossible and then one comment basically gives me what I'm looking for. Thank you.

I also refuse to give the algorithm anything. I'm not even logged in almost anywhere, and I certainly won't use an app.

I'm getting the sense that your motivation for the avoidance of algorithms is different from mine. Mine is the fear of missing out on potentially helpful information. What is yours?

Mine is the fear of missing out on potentially helpful information. What is yours?

This is certainly part of it. Even if you don't 'like' any content at all, twitter, youtube et. al will feed you only more of what you consumed previously - even worse if you follow other accounts. But I also just really don't want those companies to built up a profile about me in order to sell me ads.

It also has previously unintended side-effects: for example, people now frequently report having trouble ad-blocking on youtube. This isn't an issue if you're not logged in.

Which RSS reader do you recommend?

Complicated question. Quick answer for normies: Feedly.

Complicated answer: Are you OK with making an account and maybe even paying for it? Do you need cross-platform support (sync between your phone and a tablet/PC)? If no, your options are endless. I like miniflux.

If you want cross-platform without a third party, you need to self-host your feeds. I really like the RSS features Nextcloud brings. Use and app on your phone, the web interface anywhere else. Miniflux can also selfhost.

Thanks!

I suppose the downside to self-hosting is that the computer would need to be on 24/7, or?

Yeah, but almost nobody self-hosts on their PC. You either rent a server/virtual machine somewhere for cheap, or you put something like a RaspberryPi on your network. That uses less electricity, and you can mess with your PC without taking your private cloud offline.

If don't have a server somewhere already anyway, or if you're not extremely privacy conscious, or if you're not actively looking for a beginner's hacking project, don't bother with self-hosting.

OK. I don't think I'll be following anything very sensitive on my feeds.

I don't get how miniflux works. I downloaded https://github.com/miniflux/v2/releases/download/2.2.3/miniflux-windows-amd64.exe

but it doesn't do anything. Flashes a dos window.

Maybe I'm too normie for this shit.

Honestly, then just use feedly.com or feeder.co

Both have decent Android/iOS apps. If you want to mess around with it only for a few minutes to begin with, Outlook also still has a built-in RSS reader. It's really easy to use. Rightclick the "RSS-Feeds" folder, select "Add Feed" and paste something like "https://www.astralcodexten.com/feed/". Done. (All Substack blogs provide their RSS feed just by adding /feed/ to the end of the address.)

RSS doesn't need to be this open source nerd fest, that just happens to be the guys who still use it most consistently. The reason for that is a bit historic. RSS used to be hugely popular 15 years ago. Everybody in tech was using it, every day. But it's by definition a decentralized technology - and Google, Meta and Amazon really have no use for something like that. So they worked hard at replacing it.

The installation instructions:

Installing Miniflux is straightforward if you have some basic system administration knowledge.

There actually aren't any instructions for installing on Windows.

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