A couple of timely blog posts remind us that RSS is alive, well, and can help you resist enshittification of the Web.
Last week, Caroline Crampton’s blog post, The View from RSS really caught our attention, helped by its subtitle: What the web looks like when you subscribe to 2,000 RSS feeds. We were not the only ones who it grabbed: at the weekend, Cory Doctorow also picked up on it in a post called The web is bearable with RSS.
One of the snags of reporting on the tech sector is tackling the constant stream of announcements of radical new technology that is going to change everything. Another, of course, is trying to find out about them via websites in the 2020s, where even with an in-browser ad-blocker, plus a network one too, and an anti-cookie warning extension, many websites are still horribly cluttered.
So when someone following two thousand feeds tells you that an RSS reader can strip a lot of the cruft away, and a caped crusader of the blogosphere agrees … well, this vulture sits up and pays attention.
The origins of the RSS system go back to the 1990s, and like the Markdown markup language we reported on earlier today, the RSS 1.0 standard was co-developed by the late Aaron Swartz when he was just 14 years old.
With enough RSS feeds, web search only becomes an occasional hell.
RSS is great! Internet comes to you rather than the other way around. And its good in almost every device, even ebook readers.
The only issue is when websites tell you, ok there was an update, go to link here. And then you have to do one extra step. Its still better than endlessness scrolling though.
I use it with fediverse stuff too. Because accounts/communities can be RSS.
I just wish there was a way to do like top 10 of a community, then send it over via RSS for threadiverse stuff. Or even just the #hashtag topics mastodon and other use. That would be awesome.