Why Use RSS 🔗
I consume a lot of stuff on the Internet. A pretty incomplete list would include:
- Hacker News
- Mastodon & other social networks
- Assorted blogs and newsletters
- YouTube
A number of these come with unwanted baggage, for example spam posts in blogs and newsletters, ads all over the shop and so on. Also, most of these require me to be online (although I can of course use a read-it-later service like Instapaper). In addition these mostly come in different apps; there’s no one place to review content or categories or make any attempt at prioritisation. All these are problems if one is trying to curtail or control one’s consumption.
RSS avoids a number of these issues:
- Control Over Content: With RSS, users have full control over the content they wish to receive updates from. This is unlike emails where sometimes unsolicited messages can be received. You choose which sites or blogs to follow, so it’s highly customizable and relevant.
- No Spam: One of the major issues with emails is the spam that users receive. With RSS, there’s no risk of spam. You only get updates from the sites you’ve subscribed to.
- Ease of Use: RSS feeds are easy to manage and use. Most web browsers, as well as many dedicated apps and services, support RSS feed reading. Also, the learning curve is quite gentle with RSS.
- Timely Updates: RSS feeds are automatically updated when new content is published, ensuring that you get timely updates. This is unlike email where there could be a delay.
- Preserves Privacy: Since RSS does not require you to provide your email address or other personal information to subscribe, it’s a more private way of getting updates from websites.
- Concentration of Information: If you’re following many websites, having all updates in one location (your RSS reader) is more convenient than receiving updates from each website separately via email.
- Organization: Many RSS readers offer ways to categorize or tag your subscriptions, making it easier to manage large amounts of content.
- No Commitment: Subscribing or unsubscribing from an RSS feed is a simple one-click process. You’re not bound to any agreement and can manage your subscriptions as you wish.
- Saves Time: Instead of checking each of your favorite websites individually for updates, the RSS feed gathers all this data for you, displaying it in a single place.
- Works Offline: Some RSS readers allow you to download articles for offline reading, so you can catch up on your feeds even when you don’t have internet access.
What Is Available By RSS 🔗
Most enlightened websites make use of RSS feeds, often in multiple places. For example, Hacker News has a primary RSS feed:
But there is much more available for Hacker News via hnrss.org, which proves a variety of more specific feeds:
Sometimes a site will have an explicit link to it’s RSS feed; sometimes it is implied, eg by adding a “.rss” or “.atom” suffix to the URL.
For example, Mastodon user profiles have this kind of format:
By appending .rss one gets the RSS feed for that user:
What you cannot do with Mastodon (yet) is get a your own home feed in RSS; one must subscribe to each user (or hashag) specifically.
Blogs will almost always have an RSS feed readily available. Substack newsletters also have an RSS feed.
For YouTube the RSS feed for a channel is actually the same as the channel’s URL.
Organisation 🔗
If you start converting all your interests in RSS subscriptions you may find yourself hitting a problem: organisation.
One of the goals stated above was to be able to simplify and categorise my consumption. But if one has to subscribe to each Mastodon user individually, or YouTube channel, then doesn’t that become unmanageable pretty quickly?
Frankly, yes. But this is all the more reason to limit consumption and be extra picky with your content choices.
Some tools will help with organisation however.
Tools 🔗
The RSS tool I’m most familiar with is Feedly. This is pretty versatile and full-featured even in the free version. Personally the paid-for version comes with a lot of stuff I would never use (for example I find the AI pretty unhelpful). It does come with a decent iOS app. But, ads (“sponsored posts”) are creeping in.
The Old Reader would be the other contender. It is perhaps closer to its role model, Google Reader, with social features reminiscent of that site. It does not have an app however.
Both of these tools allow one to easily add and categorise feeds. One thing to look for is OPML import and export. This format allows you to move your collection of feeds between readers fairly easily. There are a lot of such tools, which include not only RSS readers, but also things like email clients, podcast apps etc.
There are even command line tools. Check out this selection. For example, here is newsboat running on my laptop with an exported OPML file from Feedly:
