added blog post about killing ncnews

pages/07.blog/killing_ncnews/item.en.md

@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
+---
+title: 'Discontinuing RSS service'
+media_order: paperpile.jpg 
+published: true
+date: '05-04-2021 17:00'
+taxonomy:
+    category:
+        - news
+    tag:
+        - disroot
+        - nextlcoud
+	- rss
+body_classes: 'single single-post'
+---
+Ok, this one is probably going to annoy some of you, but hopefully our argument will be convincing. We have decided to stop offering Nextcloud News (rss reader) and as an extend Online RSS reader in total.
+<br>
+The reason for this decision is purely hardware resources needed to maintain it and fact that the service is greatly abused and misused by most of the people. For a while now we are stuggling with situation where we pull a lot of news items (about 1 million a week), out of which about 10-20.000 of them are set to read after three weeks. That means that most of the items we pull and store on the server is never read.  This is because it is so much easy to keep adding more websites to read but in fact never read them (top users have few thousand sites they pull items from). Situation got so bad that the space in the database for news items alone exeeded the amount needed to store all file cache, calendars, contacts, project boards (you name it) currently stored on the server by factor of two. We have reached out to the developers but they were not interested in helping us solve the solution as they simply did not intend to have this app working at such scale. Thus, we have turned to alternatives and initially intended to deploy TTRSS service as a replacement. This service does offer better admin settings where we could easily get rid of the old unread items, however while working on the deployment, we have spoken with few people that do provide such service and learned that in the long run the situation might not be that much better anyway as issue with performance and database space does impact the software as well.
+<br>
+This then lead us to one conclusion. As users of RSS ourself, we don't really need online service to do things for us. All [RSS readers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators or this https://alternativeto.net/browse/search/?q=feed%20reader&license=opensource), available on all platforms and operating systems, do provide option to use RSS locally. That means that your app/client would do the work online service does directly on the device (keep list of feeds, pull new items, allow for reading, etc). Seeing how litter prone online solution is, we don't see much of a reason why we do need a middle man in form of online service when our devices are capable of doing exactly the same job. With OPLM files, which you can easily export/import, you can use the same feed list on multiple devices, or have possibility to store as backup. The only advantage of having an online RSS solution is the fact you can hide your IP address from the websites you pull items from (though if you pull images or other elements your client's ip will be logged anyway), but we think this is not a good enough reason to create such overhead.
+<br>
+This is the reason we have decided to shut the service down and promote using your clients locally (just like we do). Here is what is going to happen to allow as much time to all of you to migrate to other online services or go local:
+
+  - As of reading of now, all feed items (articles) have been wiped from our database
+  - By default News app is disabled for new users
+  - We won't be pulling new items
+  - We will shutdown News app completelly by 31st May 2021 so you need to export your OPLM file before that.
+
+<br><br>
+You can check how to export your feeds [here](https://howto.disroot.org/en/tutorials/user/gdpr/nextcloud/news)