Bye bye TROMnews….

Before I explain why, here is how you can still use these curated sources in ways that are more sustainable.

The Videos.

Over 100 Youtube channels. Grab the list from here.

The Problem:

There is no easy way to grab the Youtube videos and showcase them on your website. Yes Youtube provides some RSS support but for one you can get your server IP banned for requesting so many videos, and second with the Lives and Youtube Shorts you will get a stream of nonsense even from these curated channels, especially because of these stupid “shorts”.

So we used RSS Bridge to grab the videos without the shorts and lives. That means using an instance. Our own at https://rss.trom.tf/ was banned into oblivion so we used https://bridge.easter.fr/. However ALL of our videos relied on it. What would happen if that one got banned too? All sources would be gone!

Actually MANY videos from these channels were not even posted on TROMnews…maybe their instance hit limits or something. So you would miss on many videos that were posted by these channels yet not displayed on TROMnews.

Another problem is that you click a video and are sent to the Youtub blackhole. Unless you have adblockers you would have your brain bombarded with ads.

The Solution:

FreeTube.

I have been using FreeTube exclusively for the past 1-2 years and the watching experience is on another level. You simply watch videos. No ads, no bullshit. No account needed to subscribe to any channels. Runs locally so likely no ban. Very rarely the videos may not work temporarily but the people from FreeTube are fixing these things quickly.

Keep it updated!

In TROMjaro you can easily find it in Add/Remove Software.

There are so many cool settings in FreeTube. Like hiding the comments, likes, recommended videos, whatever you want to control. Or skipping the sponsored content, changing the title of videos into non-clickbaity ones, and so on.

So grab all of those Youtube sources one by one and subscribe to them via FreeTube – no account needed!

For the Peertube channels in the list, you either create an account with a Peertube instance like ours, or grab their RSS (because they are not cunts like Youtube and they make it easy to do so), OR follow these channels from your Federated account. Like I follow Be Brave To Act from my Friendica account.

There is also this new GrayJay app that is like Freetube but also lets you follow Peertube channels too. It is in Aplha but looks promissing.

For phones the alternative is “Tubular“.

You can export/import subscriptions from these apps into another. Easy!

The News.

Grab the RSS list from here. Categories included.

The Problem:

When we grabbed these news items from their RSS and into our website they insert either the excerpt or the full article. Plus you have to grab a proper featured image. For this we needed 2-3 plugins. At times the featured image was so low quality the news looked awful on TROMnews. At times when you clicked a news item it would redirect you to a post on our website with the excerpt of that news, and then you had to click one more button to read the news…

Overall grabbing news from many sources, putting them in their own categories, and all that, was not easy.

Plus these news items were basically posts on our website….thousands of posts over time…

I had to install yet another plugin to delete old posts on a regular basis….else we would end up with millions of posts.

Not to mention that the media for every post was saved in our Media folder locally, taking about 20GB of storage space. I had to manually delete some folders with old media (could not automate this). That…if I did not forget.

To backup TROMnews it would take a long time and a lot of disk space.

Overall it was a mess and a very bloated website because of the news….

The Solution:

The best way is to use an RSS Reader. I use Newsflash because it looks nice and I am familiar with it.

You can even grab the entire list (OPML) from here and import it in pretty much any RSS Reader, and that’s it. You will have all of the TROMnews News sources.

The cool part is that you can read most news directly in the reader. No need to navigate ads-infested websites. You can also save articles, take notes, or browse based on news source. And more of course.

The Photos/FInteresting and Illustrations.

You can see the list here. We mostly used Reddit to grab these posts. They can be very interesting since they are curated by many users.

The Problem:

Reddit is yet another cannibal of the Trade Society, protecting their “own property” created by their users. And so in 2023 they decided to not let outside sources “grab” “their” content (cough…created by users, not themselves), unless people pay for that. They would eventually rate limit these “grabs”.

And so we started to struggle to grab content from there. We used the same RSS Reader instance to do so after ours was again rate limited…We added some extra options that this RSS Reader allows you to, such as only grab posts with more than X votes, and so forth.

Truth is MOST posts were never posted on TROMnews because of this Reddit rate limitation. Lately it was getting worse and worse. Unsustainable.

For the Illustrations the main source didn’t even provide an RSS so we were using a 3rd party to create an RSS feed…

Overall a mess that was so difficult to fix and manage

The Solution:

Unfortunately for Reddit there is no good solution. The best right now is to either use Reddit with an adblocker, or use this Libredirect. Install it as a browser addon. Then in the settings for Reddit choose Redlib and Auto Pick Instance.

At least you will get redirected to a clean and trade-free interface for Reddit every time you visit it.

For how long this would work is hard to tell.

Alternatives like Lemmy lack the content that you can find on Reddit, in the same way that Peertube lacks the content that is on Youtube….but the more we will use these alternative platforms the more content will be there.

Conclusion

I have been struggling with TROMnews for the past years. Truth is the Internet, same as the world itself, is mostly run by traders. People who trade data/content. And so they have no incentive to make it easy for you to display this content somewhere else. So I struggled enormously to provide a website of curated news/videos and interesting things.

But it has become too much.

Today I realized that the main plugin we use to grab the RSS sources stopped working 2 days ago….and it is not the first time doing that. I honestly do not want to fix that anymore. Other errors like the pagination for News did not work, and the above issues I described, made me decide to finally give up on TROMnews.

Truth is probably almost no one was using it….people get their “news” from Facebook feeds, or even worse TikTok….a website seems like an abstract notion for many people today. It is very unfortunate.

But for those who are still strong enough to resist the wave of idiocracy you have better options. It is much better to get used to watch videos on FreeTube without the ads and nonsense of Youtube. Even better, if you can follow interesting Peertube creators, do so!

Also much better to get used to an RSS Reader and read the news like that, and not be distracted by all sorts of ads and nonsense “recommendations”.

And maybe use Reddit less…hear me Tio!? 🙂

I started TROMnews in 2014 because I want for me and the rest to have an easy access to relevant and true news. This is crucial if we want a better world. The website went through several iterations and it survived a lot longer than I thought. I feel a lot of nostalgia and sadness letting it go. But I tortured myself enough with it.

Today the internet world is so different from the one in 2014 when I released TROMnews. Back then it seemed not so busy, and you could still find a lot of positive and scientific news. But now, the amount of digital shit is exponentially worse. Webites like TROMnews will not make any dent in this landscape.

At least I am willing to save myself, my brain, from becoming a mush. And so with FreeTube and NewsReader and these still good sources of content, I hope to keep myself sane.

Bye bye TROMnews….you have been my daily friend for more than a decade. I will continue to keep myself sane without you.