RSS isn't dead, it's one of the best productivity tools I use every day

For a long time, I didn’t really know what RSS was, and when I started using it, it felt strange to realize that many people saw it as a fad that was gone by the time I got interested in it. I mean, Windows Vista had a built-in gadget for RSS news, but that hasn’t been seen in over a decade, and Microsoft never implemented anything like it again.

I don’t really get it, though, because even in the year 2025, I still rely heavily on RSS, and it’s one of the most important tools for my work. My main PC always has my most important feeds loaded up, and recently, I even started self-hosting my own RSS feed reader I can use across devices. And if you need to stay on top of news, I highly recommend doing the same.

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I self-hosted my own RSS reader to keep up with the news

Self-hosting FreshRSS gives you speed, privacy, and customization in one package

Why (and how) I use RSS feeds

Staying on top of the news

I often fail to see why RSS feeds wouldn’t be more popular, considering how easy they make it to follow the news you care about. We live in a time where Google (and others) try to figure out our interests and push the content they think we want to see, but I always hated that. Half the time, I’m not really interested in the content promoted by those services, and many other times, it’s about things I already saw myself thanks to following publishers I care about more closely.

That’s exactly what I love about RSS feeds. There’s no guessing as to what will appear on my feed or what order it will be in. RSS feed readers let me add my own sources, organize them how I want, and I always get access to the latest news from them, no fancy algorithms needed. That simplicity and straightforwardness is what I love about RSS feeds, and that’s why I set it up on my main work computer, and every time I need to use a new one for review.

It’s also part of the reason I love the Vivaldi web browser as much as I do. It comes with an RSS feed reader built in, and I can add sources manually or easily import and export my list so I can get set up on a new PC more quickly. It lets me customize things like how often a specific news feed should refresh, which also helps because some publications have more frequent posts than others, and this lets me get the right balance between saving power and get the latest news quickly.

All of this matters a lot because I need to stay on top of the news, not only so I’m informed about the latest events in the tech world (that’s fairly important when you work in tech), but also so I can cover breaking news as quickly as possible if something warrants it.

5 reasons Vivaldi should be your web browser

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Sync across devices, no accounts needed

As useful as Vivaldi’s RSS feed reader is for work, it is a little frustrating to use casually because there’s no way to sync read items across devices, making it so that many of my devices end up with hundreds of unread articles. Plus, Vivaldi’s mobile version doesn’t have the RSS feature at all.

Recently, I came up with a solution for this thanks to Miniflux, a self-hosted service I run on my NAS. Miniflux offers exactly what I want out of an RSS feed reader: a clean, minimalist experience that just shows me the news from the sources I want to follow, and it works. Because it’s self-hosted, whenever I mark articles as read, that’s saved for my account, and Miniflux remembers it whenever I visit it from another device. I don’t need to deal with articles being labeled as new on every device, even when I’ve already read them elsewhere.

Miniflux is also supported by various apps, so while I can use it on the web, I can also get a slightly more friendly UI on my phone by using an app like FluxNews. It’s still free and self-hosted, just with a more friendly frontend.

Again, this is very helpful for following news, not just for work, but for personal interests. If something big happens and I’m not at my computer, I can still see it and ask one of our writers to cover it.

Such an open standard shouldn’t be so commercialized

What I find odd about the modern state of RSS is that it still exists, but it seems like companies are sometimes trying to hide that format behind fancy services that can be monetized off of users, either through paid services, ads, or by simply collecting user data. One of the biggest platforms for bringing your news together is Feedly, but that requires an online account, it has "curated" stories on the homepage, and there’s even some AI implementation creeping in. And of course, there’s also a paid tier.

And then you have services like MSN or Flipboard, which all do essentially the same thing but with less control and less privacy than just having a simple RSS feed reader on your PC.

That’s not to say that there’s a shortage of free solutions. As I’ve looked more into it, I’ve found a good handful of options, but it does feel like the market leans more towards less privacy-friendly approaches, even though RSS was always meant to be an easy and straightforward way to get your news. It feels odd that so many services are so heavily monetized when an RSS feed reader was included for free in Windows almost two decades ago.

For all the evolution that has happened in tech over the past couple of decades, sometimes, an old format can do the job better than all the modern alternatives. I still find RSS feeds to be the best way to follow the news I care about, especially when things are time-sensitive and I don’t want to run the risk of seeing news three days late. It’s great for personal use and for work, and I recommend looking around for a feed reader of your own if you aren’t using one yet.