I’ve realized that I check the news several times a day but not because I’m curious about what’s happening on the grand scheme of things, but because my brain wants to check something that keeps changing with new, evolving information. It fills a slightly different niche than social media, and I don’t watch sports so I don’t have that to check. Can anyone think of something else that could fill this need? I could read blogs but they just don’t feel current. And the news is making be stress about information I didn’t need to know.
RSS reader. Curate your own news
‘Saved’
Thanks for reminding us and for letting us know, I will have to make time to set one up for myself!
Do you have any RSS feed apps you’d recommend?
Fresh RSS if you want a self hosted option
Newsblur. it’s open source but there’s a hosted instance of it, and it’s paid (but very cheap) so it’s a fair exchange. it’s run by one guy and has been for a long time; I’ve used it for over 10 years now.
Nunti works well. https://gitlab.com/ondrejfoltyn/nunti
This may not be the type of answer you are looking for, but personally I check on my friends and family. It helps me somewhat avoid overly browsing Lemmy. I’ll send them a text asking how they are or what’s new.
I tell my brain that this is a local and personalized news source. 🙃
Going for a walk can sometimes scratch that itch. Instead of checking the news of a national or global scale, which you can’t ultimately do a lot about anyway, you’re checking “the news” of your immediate environment with your own eyeballs. It usually doesn’t change a lot, but what else is new?
And if it’s nature that catches your interest, in addition to walking, you could follow a live stream of some animal you may or may not care about.
I got into watching an Osprey hatch her eggs on a stream. Didn’t even know about the birds until I started, but the hook set quickly.
Watched that feed for weeks, checking to see who’s been eating, who’s been pooping, & who’s still sleeping. Pretty satisfying by the time the chicks left the nest.
Everytime i go for a walk i see something new that i haven’t noticed before.
Doing what to casual observater seems like the same thing over and over again, can actually be the process of developing a deeper understanding of the subject area than before, (in this case your local neighbourhood).
Lemmy, All, Top 6 Hours
I need to start doing this more… “Active” starts to get pretty stale.
Yeah, Top 6 Hours stays pretty fresh. And if I feel like it’s getting stale it means I’ve been on too long in a row and need a break anyway.
Then I just block any communities or instances I don’t want to see in my feed.
Is there any chance you’d want to, at least in part, get away from the instant hit of info? It’s possible to train your brain out of that habit if you’d rather be doing something else. No judgment if you’d really rather find something Iike you described.
tiktok. you get war news faster than any news outlet does, you get unvarnished war and protest news as it’s happening before it’s been filtered by the spin room. I found out about Chiquita banana being held liable for multiple banana farm related murders in Columbia on tiktok well before it popped up on any other news source, stuff like that.
oh you meant instead of getting the news lol. I watch stuff on Plex and scroll Lemmy on the bottom in split screen
Hacker news is often interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/
I started looking at summarized hacker news articles in the last month also, I like the format of this:
https://hackernews.betacat.io/#
But sometimes I check Lemmy instead. It’s a lot easier to digest for the brain.
I’m definitely a news junkie and I used to spend many hours per day on that other Platform because it made for such an effective news-media aggregator. It sounds like your seeking out a replacement for that dopamine hit you used to get from checking the news all of the time. There are plenty of bad alternatives out there as others have already mentioned. Regardless of what you choose to do, I hope you periodically take stock of your own mental health. Personally speaking, this habit has sent me into major depression more than once in my life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Only very short summaries of what happened, linked to Wikipedia article for more reading.
Consider a site like arstechnica. Just tech news, less depressing crap.
History wiki’s. Not current, but shows that the news isn’t new.
my Lemmy feed. Google Scholar sorted by most recent.
There’s always the weather. I check that plus an app I have for the guages on our local rivers as I am a fly fisherman.
Don’t bother with the 24 rolling news updates. It is much better to watch a video news summary a few days later. A really really good YouTube channel called TLDR news (they have a number of subchannels) that I would highly recommend.
The other thing is to use RSS…never news websites. RSS presents news chronologically. Websites curate to put absolute shit on their front-page so avoid that. If you use an RSS app like Pluma, then it lets you set a blacklist (like I’ve excluded news about Biden, Trump, Covid, vaccines, Israel, Ukraine, Superbowl, football, etc)… It really let’s you exclude what you don’t want to see and improve what shows up in your list.
coupla blogs and lemmy subscribed ordered by top day; once I’m done with it, that’s it, no doomscrolling no more. all news and sports are filtered out, along with memes and similar stupid shit.
if im really craving something, read a book (thanks Anna!), reinstall one of the cheap laptops I got, go for a run/walk/bike ride etc. works most of the time.
