RSS as an alternative to social media
The Linux Experiment recently published a video that makes a good point: social media is optimized to catch our attention and keep us engaged, and therefore it is not an optimal means to keep updated with relevant news. The speaker proposes an alternative: RSS. It is an open standard to share updates and news, and it became popular at the beginning of Web 2.0. Now it is not so widely known, but it is still useful. News published through RSS are typically consumed by apps called aggregators and readers. The aforementioned video comments on some of these apps.
(There is also a previous video on the same channel that mentions how to use RSS as an alternative to the YouTube feed).
I found this idea of using RSS as an alternative to social media very appealing. However, although there are a variety of apps to aggregate and read RSS feeds, I wish to have some additional features that I have not found yet. For example, as it often happens in social media, maybe the sources that you are most interested in are not the ones that post most frequently. That means that your feed may be flooded by content that is interesting to you, but secondary. It would be nice to have a configurable display, in which one can distribute different sources in different areas of the screen. Of course, folders in reader apps do something similar, but you need to click each of them, instead of having a general view at a glance. To have a more precise control of this proportion, there could be filters that decimate the most verbose sources, or use some more advanced criteria. In other cases, we may want to aggregate a bunch of related feeds into one, but still distinguish them from others that are not related.
All these functions could be implemented and configured by using some kind of node interface. Actually, once upon a time, there was an interface of this kind, called Yahoo Pipes. It was a very general service, not limited to RSS, and was conceived as "a tool for remixing the web." Here are some videos that explain it:
It looks like this service is no longer available. However, here are some of the alternatives I found:
Via: https://alternativeto.net/software/yahoo-pipes/?license=opensource
- Huginn
- Apache NiFi
- Pypes
See also:
This post is just a first approach to the topic. I hope I can find some time in the future to test these alternatives and see how they can be used to manage RSS with advanced functionalities.