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.
I hope you mean “as well as the news”
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.
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?
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).
RSS reader. Curate your own news
Do you have any RSS feed apps you’d recommend?
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.
Fresh RSS if you want a self hosted option
Nunti works well. https://gitlab.com/ondrejfoltyn/nunti
‘Saved’
Thanks for reminding us and for letting us know, I will have to make time to set one up for myself!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Only very short summaries of what happened, linked to Wikipedia article for more reading.
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.
Hardware News: Louis Rossmann, GamersNexus
Other News: Lemmy (very heavily curated), Mastodon (rarely)
US Pol, Israel/Palestine, Ukraine/Russia: Blocked
I get my “education” from Lemmy
my Lemmy feed. Google Scholar sorted by most recent.
If you want a summary of science events, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_in_science.
The mastodon feed I’ve painstakingly curated for myself
Consider a site like arstechnica. Just tech news, less depressing crap.
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. 🙃
Huey Lewis
@yogthos@lemmy.ml, obviously.