What a title huh? I figured that is how one starts a blog post. Get the readers attention etc. etc.
I am assuming you have no clue what RSS is. If you do; here is my feed!
If you do not, here is a small intro:
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a user-controlled way to follow online content, fundamentally different from modern social media platforms and email newsletters. Think of it as a decentralized news feed without ads, algorithmic manipulation, or corporate control.
Unlike email newsletters where you share your address with publishers (risking spam and data selling), RSS follows a “pull” rather than “push” model. An RSS feed is simply a text file on a website containing chronological posts, similar to a traditional newspaper format.
You choose an RSS reader application–there are many options available with a good few being open source–which then retrieves content only from the feeds you explicitly subscribe to. The websites can not push content to you; you control what you see.
While RSS was widely popular about 15 years ago, many users switched to commercial social media platforms.1
However, there’s renewed interest in returning to this simpler, more user-controlled system (well, according to What is RSS anyway; can’t really see a spike in google trends; prob just a vibe the orginal author is getting from their bubble. However, it should definitely make a bigger comeback. Tough, I doubt it will happen). A similar technology called Atom exists alongside RSS, and modern reader apps support both formats.2
Did this not do the trick already?
Ok. Ok. Lets get out the disadvantages first. I do not wanna trick you into something.
While RSS is used by most sites, some social media sites (i.e. twitter, instagram) make it quite difficult to get a working RSS feed. There are still workarounds for twitter and instagram. However, it will require either some money to get a premium RSS service such as rss.app or some trickery. I will not go into the specifics here.
Wouldnt it be nice if people just go back to personal blogs. Nowadays that does not even take much effort to set up and you can do whatever you want with it. People would then, instead of following you on instagram, just subscribe to your rss feed.
Youtube, Reddit and some other social media pages on the other hand offer it quite easily. In the case of youtube you just use the regular channelid and you are good to go. Reddit allows you not only to subscribe to specific subreddits but allows you to specify search terms inside a subreddit, only subscibe to the top posts, only subscribe to posts with not images etc. etc.
So how does this RSS feed look then? Well, mine might actually be a turnoff for some but do not worry there are more graphical RSS-readers out there.3 I am just using newsboat, a terminal reader since I like it quite minimalistic and it comes with vim-bindings which I love.
I can also sort via tags and search throughout all my feeds.
