We Should All Start Using RSS

Last week, I thought about writing a new post encouraging people to start using RSS to get news and updates on the web. Developed in the late ’90s, RSS — which stands for “RDF Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication,” depending on who you ask — is one of those “ancient” internet technologies that solves some modern problems related to privacy and social media. Unfortunately, far too few people know about it, and it’s wrapped in a tech-y veneer that some might find intimidating.

Thus, I began drafting a post touting the benefits of RSS — only to discover that Cory Doctorow had beaten me to the punch and written a far better post about RSS than I could have. Doctorow, who coined the term “enshittification” to explain the ongoing degradation of online platforms like Facebook and Twitter, goes into great detail concerning how RSS can simplify your life and cut through the clutter that often defines the modern browsing experience:

RSS (one of those ancient internet acronyms with multiple definitions, including, but not limited to, “Really Simple Syndication”) is an invisible, automatic way for internet-connected systems to public “feeds.” For example, rather than reloading the Wired homepage every day and trying to figure out which stories are new (their layout makes this very hard to do!), you can just sign up for Wired’s RSS feed, and use an RSS reader to monitor the site and preview new stories the moment they’re published. Wired pushes about 600 words from each article into that feed, stripped of the usual stuff that makes Wired nearly impossible to read: no 20-second delay subscription pop-up, text in a font and size of your choosing. You can follow Wired’s feed without any cookies, and Wired gets no information about which of its stories you read. Wired doesn’t even get to know that you’re monitoring its feed.

RSS can also offer privacy benefits when it comes to email newsletters:

Did you know that, by default, your email sends information to mailing list platforms about your reading activity? The platform gets to know if you opened the message, and often how far along you’ve read in it. On top of that, they get all the private information your browser or app leaks about you, including your location. This is unbelievably gross, and you get to bypass all of it, just by reading in RSS.

Ultimately, the true benefit of RSS comes down to a matter of control, and who has it. With RSS, you have control over what you see rather than some secretive blackbox algorithm.

[T]his is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.

[…]

RSS basically works like social media should work. Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.

I encourage you to read all of Doctorow’s piece, which also includes tips for getting started with RSS. Once you get started, you’ll realize that it’s far easier than it might’ve originally seemed, and also far more empowering.

Case in point: I wasted several hours yesterday just scrolling through my algorithm-determined social media feeds, which left me feeling listless and unsatisfied. RSS offers the exact opposite experience, showing me precisely what I’ve opted to see — no more, no less — and allowing me to then move on with my life.