theodolite

NICHOLAS CARRIGG

Return to RSS

RSS is better than whatever else you are using. The Internet has many sites and apps devoted to content feeds. This is all that Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok are. People make posts, and these get displayed on your feed. But these sites depend on the attention economy to make money. I once heard it described as "strip-mining your eyeballs". The visual has never left me.

This means that these platforms have a vested interest in presenting you with:

In other words, these companies want you getting into comment wars with people you have not talked with in real life since High School. They want you refreshing the feed like the dopamine slot machine that it is. They want you to lose hours at a time, because in the process, they can siphon your data and hit you with customized ads. And they are quite happy when instead of working on your passion project, you bleed out your creative energies on something ultimately fruitless, like the perfect post or thread.

Have you ever taken a shower and thought about a banger post? Or have you ever gone out with your family and focused more on the photos you will share than experiencing the moment? From the attention economy's perspective, this means they even have you working for them even while not looking at their app. Quite a disturbing thought.

I realize this is not esoteric knowledge. But I think for most of us (myself included), it is good to be reminded periodically of what these platforms actually are and do.

A More Elegant Solution Exists

Back in 1999, when most websites looked like the one you're reading, two engineers at Netscape invented the Resource Description Framework (RDF) Site Summary (RSS) web feed. Later, this acronym would stand for Really Simple Syndication, but it is the same thing: a protocol that imports content from a given site into a reader.

RSS icon

Prior to this, people would "surf the web" by moving from link to link. People spread URLs via forums and email, or they could find pages via the primitive search engines that existed. Another popular method for sharing content were web-rings, in which sites agreed to publish links to eachother's pages.

But none of these methods updated the user when a web author updated their content. This is where the RSS feed came into play: no matter the type of content (video, text, picture), the user will get an updated post in their RSS reader from the given feed(s) they subscribe to. A few things that make this 24 year old technology better than however you currently get your content include:

RSS lost its luster as the Internet "upgraded" to web 2.0. The new social media platforms let people connect in more accessible ways. They also allowed one to share only certain updates about themselves and their family with a choice group of friends. Because after all, most static websites are accessible to the entire world.

But this privacy proved illusory when one considers that all the data shared privately with friends on these platforms was also shared by muli-billion dollar Silicon Valley companies and their data buyers. Not to mention that users became locked into a given platform, and needed to download multiple apps to view everything they wanted. Mostly, this was a trade of liberty for convenience (or the guise of it). So why not go back to when we had more of a say in what we viewed and what we shared?

Where to Begin with RSS

You will first need to download an RSS reader. Plenty of free and open-source options exist. On my laptop, I like to use Thunderbird (which doubles as my email client). For my smartphone, I like to use Feeder.

Next, go to the content you like and look for the RSS icon. Many sites have their feed at example.com/rss or example.com/feed. Whatever the URL, you will paste this into the reader app where it asks for a feed URL, and from there, you should see posts start to flood in.

The simplest way I know of for getting Twitter posts in your feed is through the open-source project Nitter. Simply input nitter.net/@[your-fav-tweeter], and then click the RSS icon to get their feed link.

I will share one more common platform people might want to subscribe to via RSS: YouTube. Some readers are smart enough to take in a YouTube page's URL itself. Another option, however, is to use NewPipe. Navigating to a channel's page in this Android app will display the RSS icon, which when clicked, provides the feed link.

For almost any platform, you can find a way to get an RSS feed. There even exist services to generate feeds from platforms that do not have them. Be aware, though, that some of these cost money or have limitations, and to date, I have yet to find a situation where I needed to use this. As with many things, an open-source developer has usually come up with a workaround.

Creating an RSS Feed for Your Site

I have an RSS feed on this site, and although I do not post often, I encourage you to subscribe for when I do have something to share. I found setting it up fairly simple. Rather than reproduce the format here, I will refer you to my RSS feed page itself, where you can see it in context (including the entry for this very post). If you can write a static page in HTML, you will have no problem writing and updating an XML feed.

You can also have multiple feeds for the same website. This might come in handy, for example, if you produce two types of content, like podcasts and blog posts. You could even post your own quick quips in a micro-blog format, and have that feed separate from your main long-form content. Others in your web-ring might have their own micro-blog feeds, and now when you all subscribe to one another, you basically have a self-hosted, federated version of Twitter without the like button. I am not saying I recommend this route, but it, and many other possibilities exist due to the flexibility of RSS.

A Small Consideration

You can abuse any technology contrary to virtue, and RSS is no different. If you subscribe to 100 Twitter feeds, 30 YouTube channels, and half a dozen blogs, you can quickly find yourself refreshing your feed the same way you did on the popular social media platforms.

I still think you will be less ensnared, because you will not be directly responding to anything, you will not be bludgeoned by ads or posts by people you do not subscribe to, and you will see everything in chronological order. But you can still fill your feed with junk. So just be wary of how you are using this powerful tool for accessing updates from news sites, blogs, and other platforms that you truly value.

Unlike many other services on the Internet, with RSS, you control how much attention is strip-mined from your eyeballs.