RSS Is (Still) The Best

Do you know about RSS? It’s fantastic!

If you’re unfamiliar with RSS, it’s a really simple web standard. When websites update their posted content, they similarly update their RSS feed (a small file containing a list of content that’s been posted to their site). Your RSS feed reader then polls this content and displays it to you, in chronological order. If it sounds a lot like social media, that’s because it is like social media, except it works with basically just about everything and lets you collect feeds on content from all over the Internet into one place.

How to Get Started

The first step is to download a RSS reader. Fortunately there are very many excellent readers for just about every platform in existence. On macOS/iOS there’s NetNewsWire, on Linux there’s NewsBoat, on Android there’s Feeder, and on Windows there’s RSSGuard. If you’re into self-hosting or have a spare server lying around, you can use Miniflux to make a web reader (which will then do all the hard work of polling links for you).

Once you’ve got one installed you’ll need to get some feeds. This part has become unfortunately less intuitive as time has gone on. You can always lazily try copy-pasting the URL of some website into your feed reader and seeing if it’ll work, but some popular sites require special workarounds:

• YouTube: Copy-pasting the channel’s URL works (not videos/playlists)
• BlueSky: Copy-pasting the user’s profile URL works (posts won’t work)
• Twitter/Reddit: Broken permanently (you shouldn’t be using these sites anyways)
• Twitch: You can get VOD notifications thanks to this service
• HackerNews: Provided via this service

Basically every other site you will run into issues with has details on how to get its feed listed here. Even sites that don’t appear to have feeds usually do have them, they just take some searching to find; it’s incredibly common for website content frameworks to include RSS feed generation by default, so it’s rare that a site truly lacks one.

If you’re the academic sort, did you know that RSS feeds exist for all your favorite journals, too? You can even use Zotero as an RSS reader to keep up to date with them as well!

Scroll No More

I find RSS to be an infinitely more useful service than most “social” media. Personally I only still keep Instagram around since it contains (although these days increasingly fewer) posts by actual people I know in real life, making it the last “social” media site that functions in the way that they were originally designed to, which is as a convenient service for people to share content with their real-world friends/community.

RSS is great because it’s simple. There will never be some random predatory addictive anti-feature, no algorithm trying to force me to watch what it thinks I want to watch, and no random ads injected in the middle of the content. It’s easy to end up wasting countless hours going through some Twitter or TikTok feed to get a drip-feed of the stuff you presumably came for because the app is designed to keep you scrolling, while RSS sessions never drag on because there’s no infinite-scroll feed.

Much has been said about RSS dying since Google Reader’s death over a decade ago, but in practice I find that the vast majority of sites that have worthwhile content still support RSS. If anything, the sites that have been dropping RSS support (mostly just Reddit/Twitter/Instagram) are sites that are already so user-hostile and toxic that I can’t imagine willingly wanting to visit them.

Despite what you might think, RSS is indeed alive and well! I use it nearly every day for almost all the stuff I care about following. Give it a try if you’re similarly annoyed with the state of “social” media and the modern web overall.