renegat0x0

Agree. Tried to publish my app through Google, and still no luck. Link below.

I was able to share it on f-droid though, and I am starting to think that it may be good just to publish app only through it.

https://github.com/rumca-js/OfflineWebSearch

I hate other things with Google. I have a feeling that we lost something. A tool for discoverability. You cannot just enter a keyword, and see billions of pages in results. You cannot explore the web anymore. If I write "artificial intelligence" in the searchbox the result wil be swamped with content farms, some pages describing what it is, but there will be no 'resources', no 'tools' to be found by it. If I put "artificial intelligence tools" it will provide me some fake pages with AI slop, not openclaw, or n8n. It gives me rank pages instead of tools.

I remember when Google was accused for forcing users to go through several pages for answers, because this translated into more clicks, and higher engagement. I am curious whether AI overview will be as bad, as people can tolerate for you to spend more time with it, more queries, which translates into more time spent with Google.

They can show numbers, how much people use their engine, and the numbers goes up.

Link manager that is also a feed reader and has search capabilities. Free and open source.

https://github.com/rumca-js/OfflineWebSearch

I noticed that it is quite a challenge to publish anything on play store

Sometimes I use my own index of domains and channels

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

I hate the very idea that destination location is opaque, and user can't verify if you are funneled toward malvertizing.

I hate even base64 encoded links in the results.

There are various approaches toward AI. Some are radical. I often found extremism to be wrong in most cases.

I have a suspicion that people who reject AI related stuff is just scared under the hood. They fight against AI because of the fear against loosing job, money, or control.

There were many manual jobs. Lets say carpenters. They had manually created things, often pieces of art. Now many things are soulless, created by factory output, and by robots. It is true that we lost some artistry. It is true that every line of code will not be a work of art. There is no going back though. Adapt.

For me programming is not art, and it is visible in my code. Code is a mean of achieving functionality. I can accept temporary workarounds, or ugly hacks. I often do them in a way to update them later on. Programming is fluid, parts can be fixed later on.

I think there are more and more apps on f-droid.

On my end the experience was more pleasant on f-droid than on Google. On f-droid I had to manually push some things, in repositories. That I solved in a week or so.

On Google end I had to verify my account. Which was not easy feat.

- had to provide my ID several times, because it got rejected multiple times

- I uploaded driving license

- the verification process was stuck

- only after help ticket google employee pushed it forward

- I had to provide many more details, also had to use banking to pay substantial amount of money

- I currently trying to create app, but it requires 14 testers, and it can still be rejected, if their involvement was too poor

I am wondering what more things Google will invent to make my life worse.

By the way my app: https://github.com/rumca-js/OfflineWebSearch

- ...but is the video encoding fast? - Does it often break while encoding?

That was my experience some years ago and I decided I will skip a decade to see it all working.

I have created something similar, yet different. I maintain my own Internet domain index.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

Also I maintain android app that can be used to search places.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.rumcajs.offlineweb...

I believe hister you have to fill in with your data, right?

I used this approach to drive entire app, and it works. Nearly all data are fetched from SQLite. User can select a database, which can change app views, and the data. In my experience it is quite fast.

My example for android app:

https://f-droid.org/pl/packages/io.github.rumcajs.offlineweb...

Note that I am not android experienced programmer, and I am still learning.

In a world, where everything can be stolen it will be hard to produce anything.

I still have hope though. Maybe the Internet will be better. Currently everything has to be monietized. Everything is ad heavy. At the beginning it was not so. People created things out of passion, or boredom. We can returned to that scheme.

I have seen neocities, personal blogs created and maintained in this year. I know I run my own "Internet index" https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

I hate to break it to you, but we are at the start of enshittification circle. Once Gemini has monopoly you will reminisce with joy google search results.

Offline web search. Private web search. No cloud. No server. Just highly structured meta-database of valuable internet domains, communities, and personal web spaces directly on your local device.

Contains predefined database with common domains, YouTube channels

Available only through f-droid for now.

https://github.com/rumca-js/OfflineWebSearch

i still use feeds often

https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds

often using my crawling server because rss are often protected against bots

https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy

I created my own database of favourite music, to be able to share what I like:

- https://rumca-js.github.io/music

- https://rumca-js.github.io/movies

Interface is clunky, but gets the job done for me.

I maintain some links from the internet:

- https://modarchive.org/

- https://c64radio.com/

- https://amp.dascene.net/

- https://sillyventure.eu/

- https://modplug.com/

- https://woolyss.com/

- https://keygenmusic.tk/

- https://8bitfm.ru/

- https://modp3.mikendezign.com/

- https://scenestream.net/

- https://chipmusic.org/

- https://response.darklite.org/

- https://c64audio.com/

- https://pouet.net/

- https://modules.pl/

- https://www.6581-8580.com/

All your links are belong to us https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

I also use my own, lets say search engine.

I download only title, description, thumbnail, common og fields.

My index is very lean, I think. I have 2m of pages crawled.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

It has tags, and votes support.

Recently I also launched my first fdroid app

https://github.com/rumca-js/OfflineWebSearch

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.rumcajs.offlineweb...

I tried recently to create dev. account. I have not yet been successful. It is a painstaking process.

I had to submit my ID, my phone number, email.

Then to verify I had to give my address. They rejected my ID twice, so I had to submit driving licence.

I am several weeks in, and could not even produce a single app.

Their algorithm already rejected me, for no obvious reason.

Governments plan to use google play for government services. It is just a matter of time before it is required for you to use it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730729

More and more sites require you to use it be it github, or even fdroid (via gitlab).

I have something similar, but as open database

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

Recently also created android app that can browse domains. It awaits fdroid approval.

https://github.com/rumca-js/OfflineWebSearch

- https://github.com/rumca-js/OfflineWebSearch - Android app with most visited domains, fast search

- https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds - list of RSS sources

- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - list of domains

wasn't mv3 a dumbed down version? So it "does not work just fine" as some ads slip through?

I use my own domain index to navigate the web.

- If I wanted to use use my domain list to start hister, to download my preconfigured / like domains?

- Can I make some pages to rank higher in it?

- Can I assign tags to pages (by which I could later on filter?)

My domain index

- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

Actually I have thought about it and I am running my personal search index.

Links

- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - Internet places

- https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds - RSS feeds

- https://rumca-js.github.io/search - demo search

- https://rumca-js.github.io/feeds - demo for feeds

- https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-top - top places

I maintain databases of links

- h ttps://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - Internet places / YouTube channels

- h ttps://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds - feeds / RSS locations

- h ttps://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-top - smaller database from above

- h ttps://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-awesomelists - links from 'awesome lists'

- h ttps://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2026 - 2026 year link metadata

- h ttps://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2025 - 2025 year link meta data

- h ttps://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy - crawler engine

Agree to disagree.

I think many platform did support RSS, or API, but at some time it was dropped. It is not that hard to provide RSS. It is not like it has to be implemented from scratch. It is just dropped by platforms. There must be reasons for dropping. One may argue it is not worth it, but even to drop functionality there needs to be a decision from management. The management always think about money. Is RSS or API monetized correctly? Free? No? Then we drop it, because data from algorithms serving user contents can be easily monetized. Just follow the money, the oldest truth.

How else to notify readers? RSS is quite good.

Corporations do not like it though, because they want to control spread of information. They prefer you re-enter page, be targeted with more ads, or spoonfed with their news algorithm on-site.

However RSS only works, if someone knows about your page. YouTube is quite good with RSS though. You can have channel RSS, be notified about new videos, while channels still are discoverable.

Also shameless plug to my own database of RSS feeds

h ttps://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds

no, the paragraph argues that something needs to be glued together, which is not true, so it is not entirely about 'visibility'.

I already complained about post on reddit. It says that link to RSS is hidden, which is not true IMHO.

YouTube page contains HTML link to RSS feed in channel page, and most RSS clients should just pick it up just fine.

By the way I maintain a list of feeds, many of them are youtube in link below, so if you would like to find a channel you can use it

Links:

h ttps://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds