RSS
What Is RSS?
RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a protocol left over from the early days of the second internet. Adopted widely in the early 2000s, RSS became a privacy conscious way for users to get updated information from disparate news sources, blogs, content creators, and the like without having to visit individual sites. An interested reader could simply drop an RSS link into an aggregator and curate an “OPML” file of interesting blogs, video content creators, news channels, and other interesting content. Simply subscribe, with no login, no sign-ups, and wait for the content to role in. The OPML file would be managed by the aggregator and with a single click (or pop-up notification), users could find all the new content they were interested in.
However, things turned sour. As the iPad generation grew up, and Social Media began to move from user-to-user audiences and became advertisers-to-users audiences, people lost their way. They forgot about RSS aggregators (or never used them to begin with) and were duped into a world where they were force fed the content advertisers wanted them to see. Strangely, for some users (like my younger sisters 24 and 19) they don’t remember an internet before the force-fed feed of X, Instagram, and Facebook. HTML, CSS, and RSS aggregators are completely foreign to them.
Relax though. All is not lost. Despite many a lost battle, the war still continues and the rebels are gathering in the dark places of the internet to #DeEnshittifyTheWeb
What has RSS?
Because RSS was so ubiquitous in the early 2000s, it turns out a ton of services still use and support RSS. My favorite use case is blogging platforms, but you can use RSS for keeping track of podcasts, knowing when your favorite author posts a new blog (like Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader which inspired this piece), posts to YouTube, or anything else in between!
Blogs
Most blog platforms come with RSS built-in! Before newsletters, search engine optimizations, GDPR, cookie warnings, and request for notification permissions, there was RSS. Don’t believe me? Grab this link www.justinmcafee.com/index.xml and head over to rssviewer.app. From here you’ll paste the URL, click View RSS and be shown a feed of my posts! Now you never have to check my site again, just wait for new posts to roll in for your perusal! And while my site is tracker free, ad free, and I try my best to protect your privacy, even if my site wasn’t, you’d be saved from the harassment. Of third party pop-ups for GDPR compliance, banner ads, and the like.
Podcasts
Podcasts are the faithful friend to RSS that never left or strayed. Podcasts are probably the sole reason RSS is so widely supported today. Almost every podcast distribution software tool the world over still uses RSS to get the word out! So if you find yourself listening to Cultish - RSS Feed on a long drive this weekend, don’t forget that RSS made it possible!
News Outlets
News outlets have been using RSS since the early days. And your local news station likely have RSS already setup. These can be great in an emergency situation where bandwidth may be scarce and you need to quickly and reliably get any updates to news or weather. Just drop the RSS feed into your feed reader and let it do it’s thing! Some sites even offer RSS feeds by category, so if you just want weather, grab the weather feed. Entertainment, the entertainment feed, and so on.
YouTube
Even YouTube has video links distributed via RSS for your favorite YouTubers. RSS feeds are available for every channel, albeit with just a little work.
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=SOMENUMBERLETTERS
Or if you have a fancy aggergator, you may just be able to post the normal channel url, and it will identiify and extract the RSS feed without issue.
Everything Else
I’m sure there are 100 other things I’m missing that make use of RSS. Weather stations. IOT devices. You’re favorite sports teams online score board. Etc… Keep an eye out for the ubiquitous orange cube with a weird wifi symbol. This symbol will be your guiding light to a better internet.
If you’re a user of Mastodon, you should know that most users will by default have an rss feed of all their content (sans re-toots) available at servername.com/@username.rss and many servers will also support an rss feed of hashtags using this syntax servername.com/tags/hashtag.rss
Why Should I Use It?
There’s a lot of reasons to cover for why you should use it, but here are the ones I’m most concerned with.
It’s Private
Because RSS feeds are queried and collected from the source without any loading of webpages, Facebook, Meta, Google, Alphabet, etc…can’t track you. You’ll never load a webpage with embedded web fonts, tracking pixels, or the like. Which means you can read, favorite, download, and share with friends all while the Advertising Overlords never even know you existed.
It’s Useable
When’s the last time you visited a blog or website and could just read the content? Where you weren’t inundated with Cookie Notifications (Accept All Cookies) that blocked most of the screen, ads that sprang from the sidewalls, Notification permisison requests, and on and on? Not to mention, if you’re low bandwidth, using an older device, or using devices with accessibility features, it’s almost a nightmare to navigate through a standard website.
RSS fixes this. By just downloading the Title, date, and body content to your RSS reader, you never have to deal with pop-ups and pop throughs and GDPR warnings, and all the other mess. Just open your aggregator, read your posts, and move on with your day!
It’s Free
I didn’t even mention the best part of this. Most of these things we’ve talked about are free. They’re just sitting out there on the web for you to gobble up! So go crazy, add every RSS feed you can find to your aggregator. Try out different rss feed readers (we’ll cover some below!) Play around and figure out what works for you!
It’s Portable and User Centric
Let’s be honest, most web technologies these days aren’t built for the user. They’re built to extract as much money from you as possible, without pissing you off so much that you leave their platforms. So it’s nice when something comes along that not only respects the users privacy, but also respects a users right to leave.
RSS feeds are recorded in your standard .xml or .atom format and since there inception, it’s been understand that they were open formats that anyone was welcome to use for publishing content. And because of that, a new set of technologies sprung up, including the .opml format.
This format is a quick and easy plain text way to keep track of all your rss feeds in one place, and to move from aggregator to aggregator until you find something that makes you happy.
Simply put, an .opml records all the sites you want to pick content from and can be exported and imported from aggregators, shared with friends, or backed up between devices.
How Do I Use It?
There’s a few ways to use RSS. The quickest way I know today is to navigate to rssviewer.app and drop in your links. It looks like that will quickly lead to you wanting to sign up and add and customize your .opml file. Don’t be afraid, remember, with the open format we can easily export the file and import it to something else.
Self-host
Maybe you’d like to self-host, nothing crazy but still, you’re privacy conscious and a bit of a home labber (if you’re reading this blog, we’re probably cut from the same cloth).
So check out these projects:
FreshRSS/FreshRSS - Github A dockerized container that supports multi-user anonymous reading mode, api’s for Mobile and command line interfaces, and a webscraper for sites without RSS.
GuyFEdwards/nom - Github A Terminal User Interface with VIM bindings for reading through your feeds in a distraction free environment. I love lightweight low-config applications like this for chromebooks, my linux daily driver, termux on an android phone, etc… It works everywhere and it just works.
In the Browser
If you’re a little less techy and you want something that “just works” take a look at EasyRSS - Komodo for Firefox. It’s dead simple to add a feed, it keeps track of which articles you have and haven’t read locally, and is easy to import and export from. If you do most of your reading on your laptop, this is likely the one for you.
It even features a nifty Find Feeds in Page feature to show you a list of feeds on the page, and quickly add them to your aggregator.
On your Phone
I can only speak to the Android audience on this occassion, though I’m sure there are some great Apple apps out there. Android is home to the illustrious SpaceCowboy/Feeder - Github. This thing is free, open-source, privacy conscious, has full tagging, sorting, and customization capabilities, and can automatically scrape available feeds when given a base url. If you like to read on your phone (I do.) and you do it a lot (I do.) and you want to sort a lot of feeds (I do.) and have things in a vaguely news-papery style format on your Android Tablet/Samsung Fold device, this is the one for you.
It can download entire stories, or just photos with the first 100 words, taking you to your preferred browser. It has special power settings to only download things when its charging, or on wifi. It really is the most feature rich and user-centric app I’ve seen in a long while.
Share Your Feeds
And finally, we get to the best part. What’s the point in being Smog the URL hoarding dragon? Sitting atop your lonely pile of rss feeds if you don’t share them? That’s why I’m proposing a new hashtag on the fediverse.
If you’re interested in sharing your RSS feeds, tag me on Mastodon and include the url #OPMLswap. I’ll be following the hashtag, and be sure to share with you!
If you’d like to follow my writings here, feel free to grab justinmcafee.com/index.xml and drop it in your aggregator, or if you’d like to see what we’ve got cookin, pick up food.justinmcafee.com/index.xml
Either way, I hope to see you around soon and hope you’re reading my next post on an aggregator of your choosing!