In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information

The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds, social media and other forms of informational junk food. It is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and it is beautiful. What the hell is RSS?# RSS is just a format that defines how websites can publish updates (articles, posts, episodes, and so on) in a standard feed that you can subscribe to using an RSS reader (or aggregator). Don’t worry if this sounds extremely uninteresting to you; there aren’t many people that get excited about format specifications; the beauty of RSS is in its simplicity. Any content management system or blog platform supports RSS out of the box, and often enables it by default. As a result, a large portion of the content on the internet is available to you in feeds that you can tap into. But this time, you’re in full control of what you’re receiving, and the feeds are purely reverse chronological bliss. Coincidentally, you might already be using RSS without even knowing, because the whole podcasting world runs on RSS. There are many amazing articles about the utility and elegance of RSS, and I do not think the world needs another, so I will spare you and instead focus on my personal experience and tips. If you are interested in a deeper dive, I highly recommend Molly White’s article Curate your own newspaper with RSS. It is a convincing, well-written article that you can also listen to in Molly’s own voice if you wish to. Broken distribution models# Here’s a little story about the promise of social media. In 2011, my band was getting a little more serious and preparing to record our first album. Facebook was rapidly growing all over the world, so I created an account - mostly to manage my band’s Facebook page. Back then, social media (and Facebook in particular) felt very different: vibrant and full of promise for the brave new future of web 2.0. I looked up all my favorite bands so that every time they put out an album or tour near me, I wouldn’t miss it. Many bands either lacked proper websites or rarely updated them in a useful way, so this felt like the perfect use case for Facebook. It didn’t take long for me to start seeing the cracks. As Facebook would push for more engagement, some bands would flood their pages with multiple posts per day, especially if they were touring or had a new release coming up. Others would be more restrained, but then their posts would often be lost in the feed. There was no way to opt in only for a certain type of updates from my followed pages, and the increasingly algorithmic feed would simply prioritize posts by engagement. I realized that I wouldn’t be able to get just the important updates; instead, I’d get a wild mish-mash of engagement-bait that I wasn’t willing to work my way through. And don’t get me started about how over time, page owners had to pay to promote their posts to get any reach on the platform - that is simply extortion. I no longer use Facebook (or any similar social media for that matter) for many reasons, though algorithmic feeds are at the top of the list. Algorithms on social media are very unlikely to be written with your best interest in mind: The goal of social media is to keep you glued to the feed for as long as possible. It optimizes for the most time spent, for engagement, for serving the most ads. It will not necessarily optimize for keeping you well informed, showing you balanced opinions, giving you control or even showing you all the information you’d like. The misalignment of incentives has become very apparent in the last few years, but the problem goes deeper. Any type of curation (because algorithmic feeds are simply curation machines) will never be flexible enough to account for every person’s needs. The story we are sold with algorithmic curation is that it adapts to everyone’s taste and interests, but that’s only true until the interests of the advertisers enter the picture. How I use RSS# My RSS journey starting many moons ago with Opera and Thunderbird, continued with Google Reader (RIP) and The Old Reader, and finally led me to running my own instance of FreshRSS. However, in the last year, I have read most of the content from my RSS feeds on my phone via the FeedMe app. I find that it scratches the itch of unlocking your phone and wanting to see something novel (probably gravitating towards social media). On the upside, it feeds me only articles and media that a) I have picked upfront and nothing more, b) is typically longer-form and more thoughtful than your typical social media posts. Also, unlike algorithmic feeds, it allows me to pick what category of my interests I am in the mood for. If I’m in the mood for something lighter, I can just look into my “Fun” folder to check out new stuff from The Oatmeal or xkcd. If I feel like reading something more thoughtful, I’d dive into my “Reads” folder for The Marginalian or Sentiers. Feeling like catching up on the newest AI research? I can browse the latest research papers from arXiv that have specific keywords in the abstracts (such as prompt injection). Or I could just browse everything at once to see what piques my interest. I am the master of what information I consume, how and in what order, and no one can take that away from me by rearranging my feed or tweaking the algorithm. One of the many small advantages is the consistency of the interface and the lack of distractions when reading. Modern browsers support reader modes, but you need to enter the mode manually and some pages might not be displayed correctly. I don’t have any attention problems (that I know of), but reading articles on certain newspaper sites feels like a cruel joke: the text of the article is often drowned by ads, suggested articles, polls, and other visual smog. Not a pleasant reading experience. Your RSS reader always uses the same font, font size, screen real estate and never shows anything but the article itself. The focused, reductive nature of RSS readers means you don’t get the full website experience, but that is arguably for the better in a lot of cases. We already mentioned the lack of suggested articles with engagement bait that could easily draw you in, but another notable omission is the comments section. It is very easy to slip into the comments section at the bottom of an article and spend far too much time reading those. You can still do that in an RSS reader by opening the article in your browser, scrolling down to the comments and diving in. At least in my case, that is a safe amount of friction to prevent me from doing it most of the time. Less is more! Tips to get you going# Many of the websites you open regularly, follow on social media or get a newsletter from, likely have an RSS feed. Look out for the RSS icon or the words RSS or feed. There are also tools like Lighthouse that can sniff out the feed for you. That said, my experience is that simply adding the homepage URL of the website into an aggregator usually works. Remember my frustration with Facebook as a source of news for new music releases? Turns out there is a much better free solution called Muspy, where you enter all your favorite artists and it will notify you of their new releases. And guess what? You either get notified via email, or you use your personal RSS feed. Highly recommended! Start easy with something like The Old Reader or Feedly - both offer relatively generous free tiers. And if you outgrow them or want to try something else, you simply export an OPML file with all your feeds and import them into your new RSS solution. This is the upside of open standards: freedom, ownership, and portability. Once you have more than 5-10 feeds, start putting them into folders/categories. No need to overthink it, but doing this will help you be more selective about the content you read if you’re in a specific mood. RSS readers can be great when traveling or whenever your internet connection might be down or spotty. You can set up your RSS client in a way that automatically fetches new content, so when you board the plane and go dark, you can still read through the already downloaded articles. (Beware, though: not all RSS feeds include full content - sometimes they’re more like teasers.) Some websites that limit how many articles you can browse for free are actually less strict about content accessed through RSS feeds. There are obvious ethical concerns with abusing this, but it is still an upside, and you are only consuming what they provide. If you want to tinker, you can set up an RSS aggregator like FreshRSS, tiny tiny RSS or selfoss on a shared web hosting service. If you want to go full self-hosted, there are many more options available. Get a good mobile app. Try a few before you settle! This is a highly personal choice because even small UI quirks and differences may bother you. If you’re anything like me, you’ll do most of the reading on your phone, so make sure it feels good. RSS readers/clients often have bookmarking/starring system which works much like dedicated bookmarking apps. Bigger publications often have separate feeds for individual categories or tags - check those to avoid getting your main feed flooded. Some websites have very elaborate RSS APIs which allow you to query for specific types of content. For example, arXiv has a really elaborate one, allowing you to only follow specific topics. The documentation is quite complex, so here is a quick example to kick start you: https://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=abs:LLM+AND+multilingual&sortBy=submittedDate&sortOrder=descending The query searches through the most recently submitted papers with the words LLM and multilingual in the abstract. Do a little cleanup from time to time: unsubscribe from feeds that no longer seem to interest you. It’s fine, no one will take offense, and your attention is too precious to be wasted on stuff that is not for you. Don’t know where to start? Check out this list of 100 most popular RSS feeds, Feedspot’s 70 most popular feeds or Hostinger’s list of 55 popular blogs. Apart from that, Google is your friend (especially if you start searching for specific topics or niches), and good blogs often link to other blogs - all you need to do is to follow the breadcrumbs. Happy RSS-ing!