I mean algorithms have their flaws but there is a reason they became popular.

Subscribe to a dozen RSS feeds and suddenly you have more content then you can read with no easy way to sort through the chuff. Also no easy way to discover content beyond your feeds.

You can also use it to create your own "algorithm".

With Reddit I've always subscribed to each subreddit individually, sometimes adding filters like "/hot/?limit=10", which only shows posts that reach the Top 10 posts in /hot. That way I wouldn't miss any post in niche subs while being able to individually scale the amount of posts I get shown from the bigger subs.

You can do the same here on Lemmy, although I still haven't felt the need to configure it, since staying on top of /new is still doable.

This is the reason why for me, I actually took it one step further and rebuilt a front end news site with Django and shared the link out with friends who are interested in the same topics, added a discussion feature. Essentially, I have a python script that runs and pulls RSS feed data. If the whole article isn’t included then it uses Asyncio, aiohttp, and Beautifulsoup to pull in the article. Dump all that to a Postgres instance then have Django run on top of it. It’s like deconstructing news to reconstruct it

There's still an algorithm and "like" system in that scenario: clicks. The news providers generate more content based on what was clicked most.

Some sites are more objective in what they report on, but there's still going to be biases in what you're fed.

In that regard, I'm not sure how different subscribing to certain communities is from subscribing to certain news outlets.

I do kinda like the idea of some kind of curation, but I'd like the algorithm to be transparent to me, so that I can go in and see what's been filtered out, for instance, and why.

Some guy on Mastodon a while back was working on a service that'd give him a digest of daily posts he'd missed from his feed. I could see the value in something like that, as long as you control the algorithm yourself.

I think I'm still stuck on the idea of a daily edition. A finite selection of post or articles and maybe a funny pages section too. Like a newspaper in the olden days.