The benefits of RSS feeds

Why I still use an RSS feed reader despite the many attempts to kill the protocol.

Tags: homelab sysadminPosted on: 2023-07-08

Feeds have been with us for a long time, but in the past decade or so, they were warped and transformed into something very different. The point of a feed was to acquire information, usually in a chronological order. You would go to a news site and see a news feed, with relevant news items for the day. You would go on a forum and see a feed of posts. Even social network feeds were typically posts from your family and friends.

But then the web became something else, something more corporate and profit-driven. Now, modern web sites have ads, sponsored posts, auto-playing videos, even malware, and of course the feed itself is driven by an algorithm. The simple, clean web sites of the early 2000s are now overflowing with flashy items, popup ads and more. Their user interfaces change constantly, and it seems you can never get to the information you need without going through various user-hostile barriers.

RSS, or the Really Simple Syndication, is a protocol meant to provide a standard way to obtain information, usually in a feed format. Every informational site worthy of the name used to provide one, although because the popularity of RSS has been going down, many sites have now removed their feeds. Still, quite a few still offer it, and I've been consuming content this way for a long time myself.

There are many RSS clients. I self-host FreshRSS myself, and have a lot of feeds that I subscribe to: news sites, blogs, press releases, forums, etc. The benefits of using RSS are many:

• Items from dozens of web sites are centralized in a single location, allowing me to see any new posts from many sources.
• The UI is consistent, with all items presented in a uniform manner.
• While RSS feeds can contain ads, the most they can be are text posts with embedded images. No video, no popup, no distraction.
• I can consume my news from any device using this single endpoint, without having to download individual apps for every site.
• Even without an Internet connection, or if the remote site goes down, I could consume any cached RSS content.

The modern web is designed to keep you scrolling, to monetize your attention. RSS is designed to provide you with information in a format that makes it easy for you, the user, to consume. This is why as long as RSS exists, I will be using it.