Long Live RSS!
I’ve returned to using more RSS feeds for a while now, and what a refreshment it has been! A warm welcome to my long lost friend, the small web1, full of cool people.
No more algorithm-driven feed. No more personalised clickbaits. No more dubious facts from sites I never visited. No more articles purposefully fed to me to please the ad-sense lords. Just control and intention over my content consumption.
I can’t help but feel that RSS is one of the most underrated tools on the web. And there’s so much more we can do with it!
It all starts with web syndication, a way to distribute content from one website to another, letting people subscribe to updates without visiting the original site. It allows decentralized content sharing, consumption, and access to desired content from multiple sources in a single place. While a conerstone of the searchable web, somewhere in the recent decade we took a wrong turn and started to rely on algorithms to decide what we want to read. This is where RSS comes in, as a simple and effective way to syndicate content across the web.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a consolidated popular (old!) format for web syndication. RSS feeds are machine readable XML files that contain a summary of the content, including titles, descriptions, and links to the full articles. It is indeed really simple! These elements are typically updated whenever new content is published.
RSS feeds can be found on many websites, including this one. One can subscribe to RSS feeds using feed readers or aggregators, which automatically check for updates and display new content in a user-friendly format. RSS is particularly useful for people who want to stay updated on multiple websites without having to visit or refresh each one individually or fill your inbox with newsletters (ahem). It allows easy content discovery and online reading without distractions. There are many popular feed readers out there. Lately, I use feeder for its slim features. You can pick the one you like and are never locked in to any platform, pretty much every service and app supports exporting/importing RSS feeds.
RSS is not just for blogs or news sites; it works for for any website that publishes content regularly. This includes podcasts, YouTube channels, and even social media accounts2 3. Subscribing to RSS feeds lets you receive updates on your favorite content without relying on algorithms or notifications from individual platforms.
If you haven’t already, consider subscribing to your favorite websites’ RSS feeds. Streamline your online reading experience and take control of your content consumption. The internet is an infinite ad-space forever in expansion. While we work on a consolidated federated and syndicated4 search for ourselves. Do what you can to skip the algorithm, and spend your (limited) time on the web on the things you actually care about. As a reward you get an intentional ad-free experience by default, and privacy-friendly too! Embrace the simplicity and efficiency of RSS, and take back the joy of a self-curated web experience.
Bonus points if you are already reading this article in an RSS reader! Send me your website or RSS feed, and I will add it to my reader.
Long live RSS!
Worthy readings: