The World Wide Web is Ill and RSS Feeds Cannot Cure the Illness, They're Merely Like 'Maintenance Drugs'
Meanwhile, Hong Kong has practically killed free press with new "national security" laws. The war on the media is connected the Web's demise (many cheap "person says" articles, citing nothing but "tweets" and not investigating actual facts, instead parroting or relaying face-saving messages from dishonest officials)
The utterly morbid state of the Web, which turned 35 the other week, is even recognised by Microsoft employees now. There are several issues, ranging from low quality of pages (outright lies, no journalism) to page size or bloat (which is in turn connected to privacy, environmental aspects and so on).
Over the past few years we kept reminding people that RSS feeds still exist, even if most sites deliberately hide them and Web browsers went out of their way to deprecate functionality associated with them.
I know technical people who used to use RSS readers for everything and then moved to Google Reader (till it died), or worse, they moved to social control media when that concept was young (before it was just mass censorship) and then stayed there as an "alternative" to RSS readers. Well, social control media is basically a "man in the middle" that isn't your ISP. It's a gatekeeper. Never trust gatekeepers other than yourself. They serve themselves, not you, based on commercial interests, ideology etc.
At the moment I try my best to retrieve material from Gemini and sometimes from Gopher. They're not perfect, a lot of stuff there is of very low quality, but we certainly need alternatives. I may need to think how to better articulate how I feel about this whole thing, as saying "alternatives" does not necessarily mean something better, just something different.
Having been gardening my RSS feeds a few hours ago, I'm frustrated to discover many broken feeds, many invalid feeds, many sites offline or outdated (sometimes they change feed URL without announcing it or simply setting up a redirection).
Our Daily Links are by far the most time-consuming activity (they take longer to curate than it takes to research articles), but we certainly hope - and truly believe - that many people find them useful. The latest Daily Links combined Gemini and HTTP/S because we simply didn't find enough Gemini links. Daily Links have been a feature in this site for nearly 17 years and they would be the last thing to give up on. They're made possible primarily owing to RSS feeds, but nowadays it takes a lot more time to find good article because news sites are perishing. As Press Gazette put it earlier this week, "Online publishers hit by declining Facebook and advertising revenue in 2023," so we can expect things to worsen even further this year and next year.
A longtime reader of this site once told me that our Daily Links are a bigger contribution than Richard Stallman with GNU (I strongly disagree with that assessment by the way), but that served to remind me that many people make use of our Daily Links.
We're still evaluating and developing tools for Daily Links. The other day Roy Tang took note of one of these tools when he wrote: "Roy and Rianne's Righteously Royalty-free RSS Reader v 0.1 (I approve of this name, but I couldn't find a website)" (it's in Gemini). █