Why I Still Use RSS
I follow about forty websites through RSS. This makes me a relic, apparently. Most people I talk to either don't know what RSS is or remember it vaguely as something that existed before Twitter. Both reactions make me feel old, which I suppose is fair enough.
For the uninitiated: RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a way for websites to publish a machine-readable feed of their content. You subscribe to the feed using a reader application, and new posts show up in that application when they're published. No algorithms, no recommendations, no ads injected between items. Just a chronological list of things you asked to see. It's almost aggressively simple, which is why I like it.
My setup is minimal. I use a lightweight desktop reader that stores everything locally — no cloud sync, no account, no data going anywhere I don't control. The feeds come in, I read what interests me, I mark the rest as read, and that's it. The whole thing runs on a SQLite database that's maybe fifteen megabytes. I back it up occasionally along with my other files. If the application disappeared tomorrow I could export my feed list as an OPML file and import it into something else in about two minutes.
I landed on this setup after trying various other approaches over the years. I used Google Reader when it existed, like everyone else who was into RSS in the late 2000s. When Google killed it in 2013, I think it did genuine damage to the open web in a way that we're still feeling. Not because Google Reader was irreplaceable — it wasn't — but because its closure sent a signal. It told people that RSS was dead, that feeds were a solved problem nobody cared about anymore, that the future was social media and algorithmic timelines. A lot of websites stopped maintaining their feeds after that. Some removed them entirely.
The thing is, RSS didn't die. It just became unfashionable, which in technology is almost the same thing but not quite. Plenty of sites still publish feeds. Most blogs do, many news sites do, and podcasts are literally built on RSS even if most people don't realize it. The infrastructure is still there. What went away was the mainstream awareness that you could use it.
I kept using it because the alternative — following things through social media — never worked well for me. Social media is optimized for engagement, which in practice means it's optimized for showing you the most provocative or addictive content regardless of whether you asked for it. I'd follow a writer whose work I enjoyed and end up seeing their political arguments and vacation photos and quote-tweets of people they disagreed with. The signal-to-noise ratio was terrible. RSS gives me just the signal: their actual writing, in full, in the order it was published.
There's a control aspect to it that I think matters more than people realize. When you use an algorithmic feed, someone else is deciding what you see and in what order. The decisions are made to maximize the platform's metrics, not your understanding of the world. When you use RSS, you decide what you see. If a feed isn't useful anymore, you unsubscribe. If you find a new site you like, you subscribe. The list is yours. Nobody is adjusting it behind the scenes to keep you scrolling.
I think of it as the difference between a curated reading list and a slot machine. Both deliver content. One of them respects your time.
The feeds I follow are mostly what you'd expect from someone with my interests. A handful of blogs about archiving and digital preservation. A few technology writers who still maintain personal sites. The local newspaper, which has an RSS feed that I suspect very few people know about. A couple of webcomics I've been reading for years. Some library and museum blogs. A weather service feed that gives me the forecast without requiring me to visit a website full of autoplay videos and cookie banners.
I also follow a few feeds that update very infrequently — sites where someone posts maybe two or three times a year. These are some of my favorites. Without RSS, I would never remember to check these sites. I'd visit once, enjoy what I read, and then forget the URL existed. The feed means I never miss a post, even if months go by between them. That's what RSS is best at, really: keeping track of things so you don't have to.
Every year or so I prune the list. I look at what I've been reading and what I've been marking as read without opening. If a feed has been consistently uninteresting for a few months, I drop it. If I find myself dreading the unread count from a particular source, that's a sign. The goal is to keep the list small enough that I can read everything in it without it feeling like a chore. Forty feeds is about right for me. Some people run hundreds. I don't know how they manage it, but then again, I don't know how people manage social media either.
I don't expect RSS to make a comeback in any mainstream sense. That's fine. It doesn't need to be popular to be useful. It just needs to exist, and it does, quietly, in the background, doing exactly what it was designed to do. I open my reader in the morning, I see what's new, and I close it. No notifications, no trending topics, no discourse. Just writing from people I've chosen to follow, delivered in the most boring and reliable way possible. I wouldn't trade it for anything.
— Kevin V.