RSS

The mission is simple: spend less time looking at my phone. I’ve made several adjustments to my information diet and to how I consume content online, but many of these changes made me even more tethered to my phone. So I set out to read more on my e-reader instead of constantly staring at my phone. Put the phone down First, a brief detour into my browsing and reading habits. I subscribe to a lot of feeds (check out my blogroll!) and going through my RSS reader gives me a similar dopamine hit to scrolling on social media - except I’m mostly learning something new rather than just being entertained. But it also means I spend a lot of time staring at my phone and reading articles on it, which is definitely not a good way to read anything, and it does not feel great either. Besides, you’re one notification away from being pulled out of your reading. ...

In one of my recent blog posts, I talked at length about the virtues and advantages of building personal information intake system around RSS feeds. You get privacy and ownership over the distribution of information without any black box algorithms deciding what to show you (which inevitably ends up focusing on ads or engagement bait at some point). However, no system is perfect, and building your beautiful garden of RSS feeds is no different. ...

The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds, social media and other forms of informational junk food. It is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and it is beautiful. What the hell is RSS? RSS is just a format that defines how websites can publish updates (articles, posts, episodes, and so on) in a standard feed that you can subscribe to using an RSS reader (or aggregator). Don’t worry if this sounds extremely uninteresting to you; there aren’t many people that get excited about format specifications; the beauty of RSS is in its simplicity. Any content management system or blog platform supports RSS out of the box, and often enables it by default. As a result, a large portion of the content on the internet is available to you in feeds that you can tap into. But this time, you’re in full control of what you’re receiving, and the feeds are purely reverse chronological bliss. Coincidentally, you might already be using RSS without even knowing, because the whole podcasting world runs on RSS. ...