You should use RSS
At the end of my post about Bluesky I said
I [...] feel more strongly than ever that the right course of action is to curate your own feeds through RSS, [...] and not only to not trust large platforms, but distrust them
and I want to expand on that some more here
Intro to RSS
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a specification for websites to display a feed of content, including metadata such as publish date, author, description, and more. RSS uses XML files, which are technically human readable due to being plain text, but are intended to be read by RSS readers or other programs. Podcasts are built upon RSS, just using it for audio rather than plain text like with articles. RSS is nothing new either, it was first released in 1999 by Netscape, and the latest version was released in 2009 by the RSS Advisory Board. It's a stable format that isn't going to burn out or fundamentally change to chase venture capital funding.
Reading RSS feeds
There are a multitude of RSS readers available to fit every conceivable use case! For a quick overview, check out this list of readers from OpenRSS or this review of the best RSS readers from Wired.
If you feel overwhelmed by the number of options, and I know I did, I'll narrow it down to my two personal recommendations:
- Feedbin is a great "traditional" RSS reader, and what I personally use. Feeds can be categorized and live in a sidebar, the content is shown in its own pane and you can theme it for a consistent reading experience across all sources. If the full text is not available in the RSS feed itself there is a button to attempt to extract the full text. It also allows you to create email addresses to read email newsletters as if they were RSS feeds, which I really appreciate. The official apps are only available for iOS, but the website works great on mobile and can be "installed" as an app. It can also work with third party apps, but I have no experience with this especially since it would change the interface, which is the whole point for me! Feedbin is $5/month or $50/year, and I think it's completely worth the money.
- fraidyc.at is a different, and as far as I can tell unique, approach to RSS readers. Rather than having a feed that combines posts from all your subscriptions, each subscription is shown on one line, with the most recent items from it shown on the line beneath. You don't read in fraidyc.at itself, it just gives you the links to what was published. Feeds are arranged by both tag and importance (how frequently to check for updates). fraidyc.at is free and is available as a browser extension or as a desktop app. As far as I can tell there is no mobile support.
If you start using a reader and decide that it's not for you, no problem! The majority of RSS readers support importing and exporting subscriptions through OPML files. Decentralization that actually works and lets you move between services as you see fit, what a concept!
It's also possible to pull RSS feeds into Slack, Discord, etc using apps/bots built for that purpose or more general purpose tools like IFTTT.
Finding RSS feeds
Gone are the days where most browsers displayed the orange RSS icon when the page you're on had an RSS feed, but you can still find them without that. There are some addons that work to recreate that functionality, and most RSS readers (and OpenRSS) should be able to scan the page for feeds rather than requiring you to enter the exact feed URL to subscribe. As for which sites support RSS feeds: most do. Wordpress sites automatically generate an RSS feed, as do Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr pages. If there's a feed of posts or content that you would want to subscribe to, you'll most likely find an RSS feed not far away. Publishing platforms like Ghost allow news sites to provide a full text RSS feed (which is even better than title/link only feeds) for subscribers, which sites like 404 Media and Flaming Hydra provide, along with The Verge with its new subscription. Bear, which this blog is hosted on, also supports RSS!
There are unfortunately some notable exceptions to this practice. Substack, Twitter, Patreon, and surely some other big names, do not provide full text RSS feeds, instead only offering email or trying to force you to use the site directly. To give credit where credit is due, Patreon does provide RSS feeds for member only podcasts, and Substack provides RSS feeds for the public versions of articles.
In summary, most places have RSS and there's a good chance that what you're already reading has an associated RSS feed and can be brought into a reader with next to no effort on your part. If you publish works online, check to see if your platform supports RSS and make sure it's enabled! It makes it so much easier to get your work to the people that want to see it, and is so much cheaper than needing to email every reader.
How I use RSS myself
As mentioned above, I use Feedbin as my RSS reader. At the time of writing I follow over 70 feeds, and am always on the lookout for more. I basically use it as my home page, and default to the unread feed. Since there's a finite amount of posts in the feed and things get cleared out from it rather than sticking around forever, like they do on social media feeds, I can quickly see what's new and I don't get stuck doomscrolling an endless feed.
In addition to the news sites I mentioned above, I follow a variety of local news organizations, non-profits, and the city news feed. This has made it significantly easier for me to keep up with what's happening where I live, and I no longer need to visit each site one by one to see if there's anything new. I used to only read about events after they had already happened with frustratingly high frequency, and this has cut down on that a lot.
Since I am able to follow social media accounts (Bluesky, Tumblr) and video platform accounts (YouTube, Nebula) I also like to use my reader as a sort of "priority subscription feed". Videos from channels that don't publish as frequently or have consistently high quality videos I always want to watch land in my unread feed, and will stick around for as long as it takes for me to get around to them. No more getting drowned out in my subscriptions tab or accidentally swiping away the notification.
On the note of notifications, I don't have any enabled for Feedbin. I want it to be an inbox I know I can check, not worrying that I'll miss anything. I don't want it to be one more thing on my devices that's always trying to get my attention and disrupt the flow of whatever I'm in the middle of doing. It also gives me the confidence to disable notifications and emails in more places, with Feedbin taking up the responsibility in a way that's so much healthier for me.
Wrapping up
RSS is pretty great! It has widespread availability, is convenient, and I believe it allows for a much healthier way to be online without sacrificing your ability to stay up to date. The wide variety of readers available means that no matter what you're looking for you can find something that fits your needs. You have the freedom to move to another reader whenever you'd like, and doing so doesn't mean that you'll lose the ability to keep up with people only on that site like leaving other platforms does.
The instability of centralized online platforms has only become more apparent over the last few years, and we cannot trust them or anyone else to suddenly fix that. Publishers have taken note, and a new wave of independent sites have distanced themselves from relying on these platforms. We are seeing information being organized more similarly to how it was before massive centralized platforms tried to bring everything under their control. Unsurprisingly, the specification that was developed for this kind of internet is once again the best tool we have to bring feeds together and reclaim control of our own experiences online.