GoKawiilRSS Is Still the Calmest Way to Follow the News
An open format from the late nineties remains the only common way to read what you chose to read, in the order it was published, with nothing in between.
RSS was supposed to have died twice: once when Google Reader shut down in 2013, and again when social platforms became the default way people encountered links. It did neither. The format is still published by most news sites, most blogs, every podcast, and a good number of things that do not advertise it, and the reason to use it has grown rather than shrunk.
The pitch is narrow and unfashionable. A feed reader shows you every item from the sources you subscribed to, in order, with no ranking, no recommendations, no promoted posts and no engagement optimisation. Nothing decides that you would rather see something else. When you have read everything, you are finished, which is an experience that has become genuinely rare.
What that changes in practice is the relationship between you and the sources. On a social feed, a publication you value appears when the algorithm decides it should, which means a site you actively want to follow can go weeks without surfacing. In a reader, subscribing is a decision that stays made. It also makes small, irregular sources viable again: a blog that posts four times a year is impossible to follow through any recommendation system and trivial to follow through a feed.
Getting started is a reader and a handful of URLs. NetNewsWire on Apple platforms is free and open source; Feedly and Inoreader are established hosted services with generous free tiers and apps on everything; Miniflux and FreshRSS are self-hosted options if you would rather own the server. Most readers will find a site's feed if you paste the site's normal address, and many browsers and readers detect the feed link that pages publish in their markup. Failing that, adding /feed or /rss to a site's address finds it surprisingly often.
The portability is the underrated part. Your subscription list exports as an OPML file, which every reader imports. That means switching apps costs you nothing and no company holds your reading list hostage, which is precisely what people learned the hard way when Reader closed.
A few habits make it sustainable rather than another source of backlog. Keep the list smaller than feels right, since the failure mode is a reader with four hundred unread items that you begin avoiding. Separate high-volume sources into their own folder so a wire feed does not bury a weekly blog. And give yourself permission to mark all as read; the point of a reader is that nothing is lost by skipping a day, because the sources will still be there tomorrow in the same order.
It is worth saying that feeds are not a rejection of anything. Plenty of good material surfaces socially. But for the sources you have already decided are worth your time, a feed is simply the most direct route between them and you, and it has now outlasted most of the things that were going to replace it.
GoKawiil publishes a feed too, at /feed, for the same reason everyone else should.
- A feed reader shows everything from the sources you picked and nothing else.
- Most publications still offer feeds even when they no longer advertise them.
- Feeds are portable: an OPML file moves your entire reading list between apps.
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