I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS - and You Should Too
I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS - and You Should Too
Joey Einerhand's Portfolio and tech blog.
Blogger discovers this cool thing called "RSS".
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To OP and the few other comments sarcastically dunking on the blogger for just discovering RSS: why? It's not exactly drowning in advocates today, and there's basically a whole generation that wasn't around when Google killed off Reader. What if we treated advocacy like this like the good thing it is?
You make my heart hurt, you're so right. It's getting harder and harder to find RSS or Atom links on sites. The more people rediscover these technologies, the more chance there is that site developers will continue to provide them.
It would be fantastic if more people would rediscover Usenet, and IRC, and ditch the shitty knock-offs like Discord. There's a pretty big contingent advocating for Jabber, which I'm ambivalent about, having been there when it started and when it (effectively) died and being very conscious of its flaws and limitations... but, still, these are all open standards and old-school internet - sometimes pre-web! - and they're often still better than the commoditized successors.
Embrace and encourage the new infusion of youth! Gate keeping is a very post-eternal-September behavior.
Pretty much everyone who has an RSS feed has it accidentally.
What’s the first rule of Usenet? 😬
TELL EVERYONE ABOUT USENET
Yeah, there was, and probably still is, a bunch of warez trading on Usenet. But everything that was good and holy was also on Usenet.
Anyway, plebes won't show up there anymore because nobody runs free nodes anymore, and the worst of us are so used to being products the idea of paying for a service is a foreign concept.
Usenet existed long before the Eternal September. It survived that and the subsequent decades; it's never been some sort of secret haven - it's been a haven only because it wasn't trivial to use, web interfaces for it never caught on, it started costing money to be on, and these are deal breakers for the people you don't want on Usenet.
Well, that rule has been mostly tongue in cheek as you are probably aware, but perhaps Usenet will once again become useful to more folks. I have never veered away from it since I discovered it in the late 90's. I suppose that makes me a part of the ES group? I'm quite glad to have discovered it. You do now have to pay to use it, but the cost is mild and the tools are all modernized with plenty of web front-ends out there.
Edited: Booboos
You rule.
I stay away from Usenet because I'm particularly susceptible to it as a time sink. It's worse than Lemmy, than Mastodon; I can spend hours in Usenet, and I'm really incapable of not doing that when I have access to it.
But I'm really glad it's still active.
I'd be interested in ditching Discord, anything you recommend?
Matrix is probably the closest; it's federated, there are a dozen more-or-less actively developed clients, for just about every platform. You can self-host your own server. It has a lot of features.
It's not perfect; it has a lot of flaws, but there's slow progress. Things to be aware of:
- Despite it being "open", there's really only one server that supports everything, and that's Synapse. It's where all of the new features are tested and land first. All other (half-dozen) servers lag Synapse. And - IMHO - Synapse is an awful piece of software. It's a giant mess of Python, and it lumbers along like a bloated, arthritic hippopotamus.
- The way federation is done makes it very expensive to self-host. Everything's fine until one of your users joins - even briefly - a popular room, and suddenly your server's downloading 9GB of history and binary blobs. This can be managed, but you may as well quit your job and become a full-time admin, because
- moderation tools suck. Aside from the most basic banning, all mod tools are external servers you have to set up and configure and run in parallel. And the most essential tool - mjolnir, a "this account is a troll spam bot, so ban it site-wide" is still very beta-ish and it's nearly impossible to get any help with setting up or using it.
- It's really a rather heavy protocol. Lots of network traffic.
- bridging is better in theory than practice. Most bridging requires you to run your own server, and few major hosts provide anything more than IRC bridging, and even then you can't actually bridge to most of the biggest IRC networks because it's blocked by the IRC providers, because Matrix bridges are a major source of spam grief for the IRC rooms. And setting up a bridge between a Matrix and an (e.g.) Discord room is a fairly significant PITA, requiring a Discord mod to perform several steps.
- It does hand e2e encryption for DMs, but it's honestly pretty bad at it. It's a better Discord than a, say, Signal. Key management is a minor nightmare and it is both prone to breakage, and complex, with a lot of fairly obscure terminology needed to understand any but the most basic operations. Like, when it's working, it's fine, but as soon as anything goes wrong, you're in a world of pain. I came count the number of times I've lost entire chat histories with people.
And to throw up a challenge before anyone disagrees about that last point: try changing clients several times, across devices, and on the same client. Delete your client and reconnect (as if you lost your phone). See how long you can go before you hit a point where you can't get to your chat history.
It's a good alternative to Discord; it's categorically better than Discord. If you're not hosting the server, it's better than IRC; the user experience is simply undebatably better. It's a crappy IM platform. It needs far better mod tools, and some competitor to Synapse has to get out of Beta.
But if all you're looking for is an alternative to Discord and you ate fine with using a public service, it's a good choice.
Wow I had a whole message written to ask for information and here you lay it out so perfectly. Now I'm in paralysis mode though and can't decide if I want to self host..
If you have any tips, resources, or a simple breakdown of what I should focus on, I’d really appreciate it! Thanks!
It really depends on your needs, like most things.
What are you trying to achieve? Just set up a place for folks to chat about a topic?
I'm inclined to suggest that if you're moving from Discord, then I suggest you pick a public server and create your room there. You already aren't self-hosting or getting bridging, so no loss. A public Mjolnir used to be on matrix.org but isn't anymore, so you have to be alert to spammers; if you have enough people you're willing to make mods, this is manageable. Matrix spammers tend to pop in, drop some fishing or advertisement; if you have someone watching 24/7 they can ban-and-remove the spam pretty quickly. Otherwise, you clean things up whenever you're in there; it's annoying, but not arduous. If you're a small room, you won't attract the spammers as much; if you're larger, I'd hope you have enough folks who can help mod.
I would not try to self-host out of the gate. If you do, start with a beefy server; you'll need a bunch of disk space - maybe not immediately, but as soon as one of your users joins a big room on a different server. I've only tried Synapse; you might try one of the other servers, but they'll all have the same disk space issue: it's a result is the design of the protocol.
Thanks for the information. I just signed up using a public matrix but will look into bridge as well and possibly use Oracle free tier to set something up instead of on my homelab. Thanks again!!
Good luck!
IRC
AFAIK it can't reach feature parity with Discord, it only does text FFS! No video, no voice, not even simple text formatting and emojis! Not to mention plenty of clients are ugly, which can't be said about Discord.
So many great things listed as negatives :(
There is a single feature I kinda wish it had, view message history. Doesn't have to be permanent history, like last 30 minutes/messages would be fine. But using IRC on an intermittent connection isn't great in my experience. Otherwise I would love to go back to IRC.
Agree about features (pplus the fact that you'd need a bouncer or an always-on client to receive all messages), but the clients are just better than Discord. Discord just feels bloated.
Element (over the Matrix protocol). As someone who grew up on IRC, it is in no shape or form a replacement for Discord.
(IIRC) Element has stopped development.
Element X should be the app to install.
It makes the most sense to get off discord by being platform agnostic in my opinion, just going to wherever you can find clusters of the types of connections you want in whatever format works for you as long as the format meets your requirements like privacy or whatever else, if you can find the bulk of it in a single place that's great but not necessary.
Revolt Chat. Only problem is they limit you to 25mb unless you're self hosted.
What might motivate someone to move away from using Discord?
https://archive.today/1Lfct "Spyware Level: EXTREMELY HIGH"
Usenet and IRC have bad usability and lack features compared to Discord.
IM applications like Jabber and such have been replaced by messenger apps like Telegram.
there's basically a whole generation that wasn't around when Google killed off Reader.
🥺 😭
I don't think "dunking" is the right word. It's just funny that people are still discovering RSS 30 years later. Myself included.
Why is it people flock to server based rss? Wtf? There are native clients galore for all platforms ever created.
Having your stuff accessible and synced, including read/unread status, across devices is a real benefit.
Fair.