you know how your email functions as a gathering place for emails from a whole bunch of different sources? you open it up, and you’ll see stuff from 50 different sources, but you didn’t have to go to each company’s website to see their message? compared to, say, checking your Bluesky or YouTube or that news site you like, where you go over to their sites to see their content?
stay with me here, pretend you had an all-in-one thing, like email, where you could see all the content you wanted, and nothing you didn’t want (meaning no weird suggested groups, no people you aren’t following, no engagement bait, no spam), that respected your privacy, with no ads, in glorious, non-algorithmic, chronological order, for free?
I’m talking the YouTube channels you like, the people you follow…
you know how your email functions as a gathering place for emails from a whole bunch of different sources? you open it up, and you’ll see stuff from 50 different sources, but you didn’t have to go to each company’s website to see their message? compared to, say, checking your Bluesky or YouTube or that news site you like, where you go over to their sites to see their content?
stay with me here, pretend you had an all-in-one thing, like email, where you could see all the content you wanted, and nothing you didn’t want (meaning no weird suggested groups, no people you aren’t following, no engagement bait, no spam), that respected your privacy, with no ads, in glorious, non-algorithmic, chronological order, for free?
I’m talking the YouTube channels you like, the people you follow on Mastodon or Bluesky, your favorite subreddits, that hilarious Tumblr account, the blogs and news sources and podcasts you like, email newsletters you want to get, and more. it would be a thing you have complete control over - you could add and remove things as you wanted, and you could consume the content you want, when you wanted, without your forays onto the internet turning into a wrestling match for your time and attention? wouldn’t it be cool to see the stuff you want to see without being bombarded with hundreds of potential distractions?
friends, the dream is real, and it’s name is RSS feeds.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s a protocol to create feeds from websites that can then be read by feed readers. you can pick whichever feed reader you want, and they offer various nifty ways to organize and manage your news.
RSS has been a thing since 1999. this is the technology of our ancestors. just kidding, I’m not that young ;) and it’s right there for us. make yourself a better internet, try out RSS feeds.
Resources:
- suggested readers: I enjoy NetNewsWire on my iPhone and Inoreader is a popular all-around option.
- use (https://kill-the-newsletter.com/)[Kill the Newsletter!] to turn email subscriptions into feeds
- turn YouTube videos into RSS feeds by pasting this https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=YOUR_CHANNEL_ID and replacing YOUR_CHANNEL_ID with the channel’s ID, which you can get by clicking “more” on the channel description, then click “Share channel” and “Copy channel ID”
- a wonderful article if you’re looking for a deep dive into and full guide on RSS feeds