I like RSS. Always have, Not exactly a revolutionary statement, I know. RSS has been around forever in Internet terms. It doesn’t have AI. It doesn’t have an algorithm. It doesn’t suggest influencers I might like. It doesn’t try to determine what will keep me engaged for another 17 minutes. It doesn’t even have a particularly exciting name. RSS does one thing, and it does that one thing remarkably well: it tells me when a website I am interested in has published something new. That’s it. And perhaps we should start appreciating that simplicity again.
We gave away an important decision
For years, we gradually moved away from personal websites and blogs towards large platforms. Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, LinkedIn and countless others became the places where people published things and, equally importantly, where other people discovered those things. That was convenient.
But somewhere along the way we also gave those platforms an interesting amount of power. They started deciding what we should see. You might follow 500 people, but that doesn’t mean you will see what those 500 people publish. An algorithm decides what appears in front of you. Something posted three minutes ago may never appear at all, while something from two days ago keeps returning because the platform thinks you might click on it. Or comment on it. Or become annoyed by it. All of which apparently counts as engagement.
RSS works completely differently. I decide.
My feed, based on my choices
Suppose I discover an interesting personal website about Linux. I add its RSS feed to my reader. Tomorrow the author publishes something. It appears in my reader. No algorithm has to approve it first. Nobody decides that another article is more relevant to me. There are no sponsored posts inserted between two articles. And there isn’t suddenly a video about something completely unrelated because an algorithm has discovered that people with roughly my interests tend to watch those videos.
There is something wonderfully straightforward about that. I subscribe. The author publishes. The article appears. And, perhaps more importantly, RSS creates a direct relationship between a website and its readers. The website publishes a feed. I subscribe to it. From that moment on, I don’t have to remember to visit the site every Tuesday afternoon to check whether something new has appeared. RSS does that for me.
Personal websites have always made RSS extremely useful
This becomes particularly interesting now that personal websites seem to be attracting more attention again. People are building their own little corners of the Internet. Blogs, homepages, collections of links, project pages, digital gardens, notes, experiments and wonderfully difficult-to-categorise websites. I like that development enormously. But there is an obvious problem. How do you keep track of all those sites?
I currently come across interesting websites all the time. Some publish several times a week. Others perhaps once every three months. I am certainly not going to maintain a bookmark folder containing hundreds of sites and manually visit all of them every morning. That would turn reading the Internet into a job. RSS solves exactly that problem. Your RSS reader effectively becomes your personally curated entrance to the Internet.
A smaller Internet might actually be better
There is another thing I like about RSS. It makes the Internet smaller. That probably sounds like a disadvantage. We have become accustomed to platforms that promise access to almost everything. Millions of posts. Billions of videos. An endless stream of new material. But I don’t need an endless stream. Nobody does. What I need is a reasonably manageable collection of people and websites that regularly publish things I find interesting. Maybe that’s 30 feeds. Maybe 100. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I selected them. And when one of those sites stops being interesting, I remove the feed. When I discover something new, I add it.
RSS is also good for writers
There is another side to this. If you run a personal website, please offer an RSS feed. Seriously. You don’t need to build a newsletter system. You don’t need to ask me for my email address. You don’t need a popup appearing after eight seconds asking whether I want to “join the community.” Just give me a feed. Most blogging systems can generate one automatically anyway. That feed gives people a very simple way to say: I would like to hear from you again.
No, RSS may not be perfect
Of course RSS has its issues. Discovering feeds isn’t always easy. Some websites hide the RSS link. Others provide only excerpts instead of complete articles. Some sites don’t offer RSS at all. And RSS readers themselves range from beautifully simple to interfaces that look suspiciously like somebody tried to rebuild an email client from 2004.
But those are relatively minor problems. The underlying idea is still excellent. In fact, I would argue that it makes more sense today than it did ten years ago. We have spent years complaining about algorithms, advertising, tracking, engagement optimisati on, walled gardens and platforms that continuously change the rules. Meanwhile, RSS has been sitting quietly in the corner, waiting to be appreciated again. I never stopped using it. And I never stopped loving it.
You can read more about RSS here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS