Why Bother With RSS?

The Components

RSS has two components: the feeds and the reader.

The feeds are your sources. Most websites have feeds. It is the stream of content from the site.
It is an old technology at this point, dating back to the 1990s.

The readers are what aggregate your feeds and allow you to read. It can also do any number of other things.

The Benefits

  1. Decentralized

    • You don’t have to worry about a vendor stopping support (we already suffered through that, thanks Google)
    • OPML allows you to export and import your feeds

  2. (Potentially) no tracking

    • Good RSS feeds post their entire or enough to decide if a click is warranted to their site
    • Able to read from a centralized location that doesn’t require you to jump onto their site, log cookies, log in, etc.
    • Good RSS readers won’t sell you out, but if they do, see point 1 above.

  3. No algorithm

    • You curate your experience, you control your experience
    • AI slop is less present, and if it becomes an issue…you are the curator.

Additional References

A smarter person was more verbose on this subject, see this post by Cory Doctorow.

Garbage Day had some insight in the section of their newsletter, “Let’s Talk About Online Distribution!” that is worth a read too (also it is one of my favorite publications).

Interested in getting started with RSS, here you go!