I see that there is a News Aggregator section in the site, and I recognize that Cloud RSS readers aren’t the best in terms of privacy friendliness. However, I’ve came upon this new open-source RSS reader: FOLO and checked its privacy policies. I was just wondering how good it could be by this community’s standards, and wanted some help to better understand how good/bad could its privacy policy be. My main concern is that it sends a lot of trackers that are blocked by Brave Shields. In comparison, the one I use now (Commafeed) has only 1. I don’t really know if this information would be a good indicative of how privacy friendly it is.
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I know that cloud hosted RSS feeds are not really a recommendation, but I’d like to know what is your opinion on this app since it really is the best choice to sync feeds without selfhosting, but I wouldnt like it if it was really invasive
Anything cloud hosted is not a recommendation.
I know it is not a recommendation based on the criteria. I just wanted to better understand if the tool could be invasive or not, since my understanding on the matter is not wide.
You said it yourself. It is invasive.
The trackers are all from the same domain. I just don’t know if it keeps trying again because of it being blocked. The count just goes up one per second.
It has elements of AI in it. That itself is a deal breaker. I don’t care if its FOSS or not. I also don’t like its UI/UX. Its not simple enough for what an RSS reader should be - only for your RSS feeds. Not everything else too.
I’m sick and tired of AI everywhere.
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I really liked its UI, and don’t really mind AI if it can be disabled, and it can be. Of course, it needs some improvements. For my use case, I wanted a cloud FOSS solution that could sync between devices. Commafeed seems to fit, but its UI breaks when posts have a certain format that makes it difficult to use via mobile. Also, I couldn’t use it via API to sync with local clients, it’s bugged with an open issue on Github. So I’m searching for alternatives and Folo looked like the best for my use case.
Also, personally I’m using it for a “doom-scrollable” feed like some subreddits and other stuff because I don’t use social media. Some times, I just want to scroll without doing nothing to kill some time, and I find RSS to fit this use case as well, in addition to following news.
Me too.
While I generally share this view, a RSS reader with local AI to generate summaries for longer RSS articles or to have a summarized “What happened today” based on the RSS feeds would be at least an actual useful usecase for AI.
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It depends on how you value AI.
If I wanted summarized reports of web pages, I could use any other tool or even an extension to do that for me. I prefer to read and understand what’s written and summarize it myself. You never know what piece of info in what article is key or important.
Over use and reliance on AI is going to make me (and others) less smart or even stupid. It’s analogous to how my spelling skills took a massive hit over time with the introduction and reliance on auto correct all the time everywhere.
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You know what would be even more useful? Actually reading everything instead of generating short summaries with some predatory chat bot.
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Yeah of course there are millions of tools out there that can summarize webpages, but it would at least be an actually useful case of AI everywhere instead of what FOLO does imo
Off topic
I’ve also read many articles on AI induced psychosis and other AI related scary stuff recently, glad that AI was never really useful for me yet.
Never said anything against that