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.
It’s strange that the author only checks offline readers. I selfhost FreshRSS, and I love that I can just switch between my desktop and phone, and read the next article on the bus or somewhere else. For those not into selfhosing aforementioned FreshRSS offers some free and paid 3rd party options: https://www.freshrss.org/cloud-providers.html
The other RSS tool I can’t live without is the Firefox addon Want My RSS: It adds a little RSS icon on the sidebar on websites which has feeds, so while browsing it’s just one click and you are subscribed! https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/
It’s really not that weird. Most people aren’t going to self-host… anything. A news magazine isn’t going to bother covering it, even if it is focused on tech news.
Not selfhosting but single device usage. I never understood offline readers, I got into rss with Google Reader (never forget), rss was always an online thing for me, like social media. Tried some desktop readers, but always as a sync client, not standalone. My reader journey was: Google reader -> Feedly -> TTRSS -> Freshrss