Same reason we did in ancient times, aggregating content

For the most part, I don’t visit websites. I can parse through hundreds of articles in minutes and jump immediately to what interests me. Hell of a lot faster than hopping from site to site in the hopes there’s something of interest.

RSS is an aggregation protocol that is

• distributed
• pull-oriented
• self-curated

This is in contrast to reddit, digg, lemmy, or other aggregator services which are

• centralized (even if federated)
• push-oriented
• public input w/ moderator curation

Each of these decisions has tradeoffs.

Podcasts.

Anecdata. I was hooked by RSS right from the outset in the mid-2000s. I used Google Reader for a bit and Netvibes for several years. It was amazing. This was the way the open internet was supposed to be. I had a dashboard to follow a whole bunch of cool sites and blogs, with not a scummy ad in sight. At one point there was even this cool tool whose name I forget which would filter RSS items, by means of multiple dials, based on their social-media buzziness. This was obviously a dangerous slope to be on, but at the time it felt safe enough and it was incredibly powerful at fine-tuning the signal. Again: all without any advertising or spying.

Then websites began to drop their feeds. Stuff began to break. I succumbed to the prevailing wisdom that RSS was on the way out, and tried other things. Lots of things, including Twitter and Pocket and Reddit and Google Alerts and probably even email at one point. Nothing came close to the functionality and freedom of RSS.

So, to cut the story short, I went back to RSS. It hadn’t gone away after all. In fact, the rot seems to have stopped. Major blogging software like Wordpress still provides it, obviously. But so does Youtube, if you hunt a bit. Some news sites have even improved their offering. Maybe they finally grasped that RSS is like email: it’s an ally against big tech domination. And for the rest there are now lots of tools to generate RSS feeds on the fly. Right now I use a modified Python script that does this for a couple of news sites I can’t live without. It works great, although this is obviously not a solution for normies.

RSS is just an acronym but the principle is as relevant as ever. There needs to be an open standard for getting a summary of recently-published content on their web. RSS is the plumbing solution that works best and I hope it can be improved and made better still.

Control over the content I consume.

Saves me the bother and time of visiting many sites on a regular basis to see what’s new. RSS is delivered to me.

By choosing what I sign up for, I know what I think I’m going to get and will soon unsubscribe if not. If so I miss nothing. Same reason people prefer purchases of things they know they want to be delivered to them. THAT’S “modern times” to me! You only drive to the store if there’s a reason to.

How can you follow a hundred sources talking about different arguments you wanna check at different times and different time intervals?

It remains the only good way to track hundreds of websites at once.

When Google Reader went down, I migrated to Feedly and all the 3rd party apps switched too. Basically every news site supports it (usually with per-topic feeds) and it’s great for keeping up with things like podcasts, software releases, and things like that. Anything that isn’t super urgent but you don’t want to miss an update about is ideal for RSS.

I used to use Twitter for breaking news before it went fash but Mastodon and BlueSky are fine for that (and getting better every day). And I’ve always hated algorithmic news tools; every time I try one, I just get topics I don’t care about from low quality sources that I’d never read. So, I just stuck with RSS.

It’s an easy way to keep tabs on websites that sporadically publish content.

It also encourages me to read the news more often.

It’s really useful for distributing podcasts.

You could also use it to follow things, if you want to follow them. People often cross-post to social platforms when they publish a new thing, but if you don’t want to try and agree on a platform (or on ActivityPub) with everything you want to follow, you can use RSS.

Where does one get a good rss feed viewer? My Google and ddg is full of shit adds that are not rss feeds

Twitter replaced my rss feed. Then Twitter sucked.

For ongoing series of published articles about modern times