Hacker News Reader

Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

Also, for those of us who are strictly users and are not likely to contribute, we don't have to take sides in anything.

1. Use the RSS client of your choice

2. Go to a master list of all federated Lemmy communities e.g. https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1

3. Click through to any community on any instance that looks interesting and add its RSS feed to your client.

I don't know precisely what the future of Lemmy will be, I wish them well because they've produced a cool piece of software which is more open than Reddit and puts RSS front and center. But for the time being I simply have some Lemmy feeds right next to the old.reddit.com feeds in my RSS reader, pure win for me as a user. My universe grew and I don't have to have a horse in anyone's race. This is why we RSS.

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Is there a good list of lemmy instances somewhere that includes a brief description of the instances' mission statements?

https://join-lemmy.org/instances

Less than a sentence per instance, but it's enough to get a decent sense of what instances you're interested in exploring more.

How do you like and reply in RSS?

Well, OP already states that RSS is solely for people who only consume, not contribute. So no voting or commenting.

Then again, I have hacker news in my RSS feed and get a link to both the article and comment thread. That's how I'm now able to reply to your comment. Not sure if Lemmy (or reddit) support this out of the box as well.

Lemmy does, essentially every view in the UI (user, community, front page, etc.) has a corresponding RSS feed linked at the top.

> already states that RSS is solely for people who only consume, not contribute

He doesn't, he's opposing users to contributors to the software in a response to the forking comment. Users do like/comment

> That's how I'm now able to reply to your comment.

No, you're able to reply using a separate app

RSS doesn't need to solve this problem. If you decide you care enough about a given community you can make an account on that instance and go do it the regular way.

The problem RSS solves is it prevents your whole world being captured by a particular community, instance, server, platform, company, whatever. Half the Internet is having an existential crisis over the Reddit implosion. RSS users aren't - we're kind of shrugging our shoulders and saying, well that's one of 10 places we get community, info, whatever, sure it's a big one but if it vanished overnight (which it sort of did) 85% of my feed would still be there.

Reddit, Lemmies, blogs, podcasts, Mastodon instances, weird alt Tube sites, the Chans, the Tildes, SDF, probably more - contrary to recent HN posts about how all the web feels "samey" now, it's a big 'net out there these days. It's merely a question of the company you keep. If you only ate at chain restaurants, you'd feel that food has gotten pretty lame too.

> RSS doesn't need to solve this problem

Until it does it's not an alternative to SOCIAL networks

> If you decide you care enough about a given community

What if I don't have time to evaluate the whole community and just decide that I care enough about a given piece of content and want to add my very valuable contribution by upvoting?

> whole world being captured by a particular community, instance, server...

This is a nonexisting problem since there are many of those, so

> one of 10 places we get community, info ... 85% of my feed would still be there

this comparison doesn't make sense, if you only used Reddit for 15% of you news/ consumption, didn't care about it (didn't have any social capital there etc.) or other users, you'd also not have any existential crisis regardless of whether you used RSS or something else to read Reddit/other sources

I don't get the broader point you're trying to make here. That RSS is no good because it doesn't provide some kind of unified ID, posting/commenting capabilities etc.?

I like tools that do one thing well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

It's well documented that 95% of users are lurkers. 95% of the time I'm lurking, too. That's why following multiple communities across multiple platforms is useful. For the frequent times when we all lurk.

The broader point is pretty simple - you suggestion fails in the relevant problem domain, which is social networks

> It's well documented that 95% of users are lurkers

then you wouldn't mind citing a source? Though bear in mind that in this context lurker is a social media platform user who: a) reads but b) never interacts (no likes, no shares, no comments, no posts, no messages, no games etc.)

> you suggestion fails in the relevant problem domain, which is social networks

You say this when I’m talking to you through my RSS reader’s built-in browser. That seems pretty social to me.

I’ve done the same with Reddit, and if Lemmy is truly as RSS-filled as this thread has led me to understand then the same is possible via Lemmy.

Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean it “fails”.

> Until it does it's not an alternative to SOCIAL networks

I get what you’re saying butI think this doesn’t matter quite as much as it does with Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Plenty of us preferred when Reddit was less like a modern social media network (mostly the pitfalls) and are more than happy just lurking. I don’t need an online status light. I don’t want some weird “snoovatar” NFT nonsense. I want /r/videography so I can continue to learn about my craft. An RSS feed sounds great and I’m kind of annoyed at myself for no thinking of it already lol.

> weird alt tube sites What does this look like for you? I've failed to migrate any of my video consumption off YouTube due to lack of discoverability. (I know you can sub to yt channels via rss too but I'd like to do that less ideally to de-silo my video sources)

Discoverability is rather hard, not all YTers will announce their alt channels. I’ve found the most luck with LBRY/Odysee, especially STEM channels, and they even have a plugin for this[0]. However I haven’t tested it personally.

I also suggest using Invidious for getting YT RSS feeds, its incredibly simple and a much cleaner (and more private) experience all around.

[0] - https://github.com/LBRYFoundation/Watch-on-LBRY

I'll check out lbry/odysee, I've used invidious but have found it difficult to repair get 1080 there for some reason

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