In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information

Summary

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.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 fut...