This post emerged from @oddevan who posted this;

So on Twitter I got a lot of news by osmosis. Anyone have any Micro.blog or fediverse accounts they recommend on that front? Or should I just start curating my Apple News again?

I don’t want to be as angry as Twitter could make me, but I do want to keep an eye on things.

I started writing yet another long reply and thought ’STOP’. This needs to be a post in its own right … because I wanted to broaden the topic into a more general ‘finding news sources’, because I personally never found Twitter to be useful in bubbling up good news stories that I wasn’t already aware of, The Fediverse is better, but there is so much more.

First - What Is News

I have a view that ‘news’ per se is an homogenous commodity. No differentiation. It is what it is. Balloon blown out of the sky, earthquake the other side of the world, lay-offs in America … it all gets reported, by ‘all’ … assuming it is important enough. Of course, the ‘rabid dog bites postman’ story in the village 5 miles away might not reach the NYT until that story is repeated 10,000 times across the world and then the NYT comes out with the story ‘what’s up with all these rabid dogs’ ….

So job 1 .. decide WHAT kind of news you want. I for example am very interested in music, so in my feed (I’ll come to that later) I have a number of publications that stream news about music. Same for tech, business, politics, environment, books …..

I also happen to think that paying for THAT part of the news is a non starter. Why pay if everybody has it, unless it is so niche and specific that they don’t.

Opinion

That said, commentary and opinion around that news is where value can be found. That comes from all kinds of organizations and people … none of which do not have an axe to grind. As such the commentary of writers like (say) Pilger and Hedges on (say) Assange is going to be very different to that of (say) Brooks and Will.

So … Recommendations really come down to not just your interests - but your taste, your predilections even things like your geography - which makes it hard.

I would agree with @odd 100% and like him, I use a **feed reader **- and like him - Feedbin with NetNewsWire. The sources and organization of the feeds have been built up over many years - and because it is using RSS and Feedbin are good people, I can move my feeds to somewhere totally different with very little effort.

If you are just starting out I can highly recommend Feedland that you will find here though at the moment, you can’t sign up because @dave is making changes at the backend - and removing twitter dependance - but you don’t need to sign on to get the value …

For example

I am not fully into Feedland for all kinds of reasons, but I love the thinking going on. Really hoping that people will start picking up on what is going on over there.

I hope this helps.

There is another post I just published called My Knowledge Stack that you might also find useful.