I’m slowly trying to degooglefy my life, and Google news is one of the first sites I check when I log in in the morning.

What news aggregators do you use? My ideal one would be able to give local news when given a location, and allow some sort of tuning of source priority (even if that’s just blocking certain sites from the aggregate).

I’m also not opposed to rolling my own, but I’m not sure how I’d start with a project like that.

    • WheeljackOP
      2·
      4 years ago

      I grabbed newsboat and have been adding RSS feeds to it. I dig that it’s very straightforward, no cruft, text config files, and as a bonus I was able to set it up with Vi-style keybindings.

      The only thing it doesn’t do, and I don’t know that it -could- is the actual aggregation part. I think that would need some form of AI to group similar posts.

      Though, I wonder if something could be set up to go through all posts in the feeds that are less than a certain age and do a keyword count. Even if it was just the top X words by count (excluding common words), that would give some sense of what the trending topics are… hrrmmmmm…

  • wraptile
    9·
    4 years ago

    I use self hosted rss reader miniflux and it has been by far my favorite experience! Let me sell you on miniflux real quick:

    • tag based: you tag all of your feeds with their topics and miniflux allows you to browse specific tags, kinda like lemmy. So if you’re in the mood for local news, you can read local etc.
    • keyboard shortcut based UI: walk through articles, open them, mark them as read, save them for later — everything quick under your finger tips.
    • self hosted: drop it in on your server and you can read your news synchronized on any device! It’s really easy to host too.

    I use feedly to find some feeds to follow as it has a pretty nice “popularity based” discovery and import those feeds to my miniflux server.

    Don’t be scared off by “self-hosted” part. It’s literally just install > config postgres sql with 1 command > enable systemd daemon — very simple! Finally they offer paid hosting for 15$/year which is by far the cheapest feed reader out there! For example feedly is like 150$/year 😬

    • abbenm
      2·
      4 years ago

      Thanks! Miniflux looks great. I will say, Newsblur is a very feature complete, awesome rss reader, and its paid version is ‘only’ $36 a year, and it doesn’t require self hosting. It’s not as cheap as $15/year but is at least in a similar ballpark.

  • ant
    6·
    4 years ago

    I use RSS for most things, but gonna be hard to beat Google at aggregation. Posting here so I can see the replies.

    • WheeljackOP
      5·
      4 years ago

      I was thinking RSS might be the best way to do it, as then I can can completely control which sources are in the feed. The problem of course is that I completely control which sources are in the feed, lol.

  • kir0ul
    4·
    4 years ago

    There’s LibreNews. It’s not perfect since it’s mainly news from BBC, but they plan to add more news sources in the future.

  • kujaw
    3·
    4 years ago

    Just use Lemmy’s RSS channels. I use it in e.g. Liferea (for desktop).

  • Finnjjb
    41·
    4 years ago

    As a member of the team, I thought I’d throw ‘Mojeek’ News into the mix. https://www.mojeek.com/news It’s still relatively small at present, so won’t tick all your boxes you mentioned in the post, but worth checking back in every now and then. We will gradually add more media outlets, providing a more complete collection of publishers worldwide covering all topics. And of course no tracking whatsoever - meaning no data extraction or being put into filter bubbles.