I suppose the same could be said on the lemmy side. There’s no reason someone couldn’t write a lemmy app that lets you do what an RSS client does in terms of only showing content from a selected subgroup of communities.

You raise a good point that it would be nice to have more control over which group of communities you are drawing from at a given time. (Is there a way to group subscriptions and switch between them?) It’s a bit disconcerting to see 5 tech headlines and then suddenly something about the war in Ukraine or whatever. It jars my train of thought. With an RSS client, you can group feeds however you want.

That said, my experience with RSS readers is not quite so idyllic. In the end, rather than having nicely partitioned feed groups by topic, I wind up having to separate the ones that produce content frequently but with a poor signal-to-noise from those that post once in awhile but are generally worth your time. With something like lemmy, people are helping you do the work of finding the more interesting content from that site that posts every 10 minutes.

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Anyways, did I miss anything?

I think the big problem in link aggregation is how to sort/prioritize content for the end user. RSS does not provide a way to do this, nor should it as far as I’m concerned. It should simply be about public content being tagged in a standardized way for any app to come along and organize it using whatever algorithm.

A simple RSS reader has the problem that the more prolific sites will tend to flood your feed and make it tedious to scroll through miles of links. Commercial news portals try to learn your tastes through some sort of machine learning algorithm and direct content accordingly. This sounds like a good idea in theory, but tends to build echo chambers around people that reinforce their biases, and that hasn’t done a lot of good for the world to put it mildly.

The lemmy approach is to use one of a number of sorting algorithms built atop a crowd-sourced voting model. It may not be perfect, but I prefer it to being psychoanalyzed by an AI.

Btw there was a post from about a month ago where someone was offering to make any RSS feed into a community. I’ve subscribed to a few of them and it’s actually pretty awesome.

Didn’t kbin have a separate mechanism for supporting a post in a more public way? I can’t remember how that worked now, but it was in addition to the regular voting I think?

I haven’t done so personally. A lot of my old activity had to do with helping people with programming questions, so if it’s still useful to someone on occasion, I don’t feel inclined to remove it.

I left reddit a little over a year ago now, and I don’t really care about what goes on over there. I made my statement of displeasure by simply ending all activity on the platform. I figure whatever legacy I left will eventually descend into irrelevance without my having to physically delete it all. At this point, that just sounds like work.

I think when you upvote, you make the post more visible in people’s feeds, while boosting is more about increasing the reputation of the poster? I’m not sure what the latter implies, though. One notable difference seems to be that boosting is not anonymous. Everyone can see it was you who did the boosting.

I’ve been intrigued by this one. Might give it a go! Hubzilla also sounds interesting, if a bit hard to get my head around what exactly what it does?

Yeah, lemmy does have a certain BBS/FidoNet vibe. Makes me nostalgic…