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Why I Still Use RSS

Marc on 2021-02-03

I firmly believe the Internet, and what it stood for, peaked with
RSS.

RSS, or Really-Simple-Syndication, is (or was depending on your
viewpoint) a means of allowing basically anything online to be
collated into a single feed. You would visit the websites you loved,
add their RSS feed to your preferred reader, and from then on be
instantly notified of any new content, it was as simple as that. RSS
primarily had its heyday during the Web 2.0 era (circa 1999-2010)
when the freedom to do whatever you wanted with the information
present on the Web was really the driving force behind a lot of new
features and systems. This was of course before Social Media had
taken off in the way we know it today and most of these concepts were
siloed off into their own locked-down social-feeds.

Once Social-Media took its hold on the Web if there was something/
someone you wanted to follow online you just added them to your
Twitter feed or subscribed on YouTube; a fine idea until you decide
you don't like the layout of the site in question or an algorithm
decides you don't need to see the work of those you care about as
often as you want (aka the curated timeline). I've already spoken
before about my general disinterest with Social Media but it wasn't
until somewhat recently that I decided to really start looking for
alternatives - searching for a better way to interact with the
Internet. I found my answer in RSS. I enjoyed the freedom to see
sources as I wanted, the flexibility to move to a new reader if I
wanted, the complete lack of advertising. It was hard to not fall in
love with the service.

However it wasn't until I began working from home and everything in
my life moved online that I really began to notice how beneficial RSS
could be with relation to Digital Wellbeing. By selecting only the
sites, blogs, creators etc. that I had a serious interest in, I could
effectively remove the negative effects of social media and excessive
online usage from my life. It was easier to get involved in serious
Deep Work as I had no social feeds to endlessly scroll through. It
was easier to stay informed as I could only see the latest items
rather than being given an algorithmic infinite feed of supposedly
"breaking news." I could open my reader maybe twice a day, skim
through the latest items and continue on with my work, a process that
could be over and done with in under 5 minutes - a far cry from
opening Twitter and suddenly 2 hours have passed...

Another use-case I was surprised to develop was managing
collaborative projects. An issue I've heard repeatedly from those
working from home is that of being deafened by the ever-present,
ever-ringing notification-bell as countless chat and collaboration
apps incessantly vie for your attention with new questions, comments,
and discussions that may-or-may-not need your already splintered
focus. For me, RSS solved that issue. Instead of checking-in every 10
minutes to see if there's any new project developments, or sending
chaser messages asking if a colleague finished up on that feature - I
can just track everything with RSS. If anything comes up that I need
to know about, RSS will be there to present it to me.

As I said during the introduction of this post, RSS may appear to
some to have fallen by the wayside as content is increasingly siloed
into only being available on a specific platform. However a not
insignificant number of sites still make the service readily
available, for instance:

  * Reddit still offers RSS support by appending /.rss to the end of
    a given URL.

  * GitHub allows you to add an activity feed of your followed
    accounts/organisations by clicking the feed icon at the bottom of
    your account page.

  * YouTube offers RSS support by adding a channel ID (The series of
    numbers and characters present in the URL of a channel homepage)
    to the following URL:

www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID

Having only the content I want to see only be shown when I want to
see it with the freedom to jump between readers as I please, all with
no ads? For me, no other service comes close to the flexibility,
robustness, and overall ease-of-use that RSS offers.

Its heyday may be over but RSS is still very much alive with services
like Feedly and Newsboat (recommended) along with a host of mobile
apps on either platform letting you experience the web at what I
consider to be its best. If you feel like trying out RSS for
yourself, why not get started by adding this blog to your reader?

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