Feeling rather awkward admitting that only recently I discovered the power of RSS Feeds. My husband asked for help with his news problem. Just like I struggle with social media, he who has no online socials at all, struggles with reading the news too much.
He asked if I knew how RSS works to which I said I know of the name and logo but that’s it. You can learn the basics here. In short, there are two things: RSS Feeds and RSS Readers. A feed is the content from a website, the website would like you to know when they publish something new. An RSS Reader is an application that lets you collect the RSS of the website in one place so you can get notified every time the websites publish new content.
So for example, my blog has this RSS Feed. You input that RSS URL into a RSS Reader of your choice and when I publish something you will get a notification. No local account needed, easy.
Okay, that’s cool I guess. Why should I care about RSS Feeds?
If you are interested in depending less on social media platforms like Instagram for your content fix, or if you can’t help clicking on suggested news articles from the browser home page then you might want to look more into it.
The reason it instantly appealed to me was the idea to follow blogs outside of the WordPress ecosystem. I suddenly had the whole web to choose from. The idea of curated content without ads was already a good starting point. I opened old bookmarks from my time in university, while some websites had disappeared, others were still going strong. I started discovering who has RSS feeds and who doesn’t and couldn’t help correlate how this reflects their stand on the open web. In the end, RSS are actually about accessibility. The RSS readers can be customized to different user needs. Right now I am trying the freemium of NewsBlur, my research pointed this app as beginner friendly to someone new into this topic like me.
So far I am having fun curating and honing my experience. I jump with joy when a creator I follow has feeds. And yes, it’s very frustrating when they don’t. Since I deleted Instagram from my phone, now when I’m out and have a quiet moment that I would have filled with doom-scrolling I read a blog post or some local news. The feeds are obviously slower than any social media platform so it doesn’t suck my time. It feels intentional and the content I’m reading is good for me. It feels like a breath of fresh air after having an algorithm decide what I see for so many years. I am back in control.
This also led me to stumble again with the concept of the fediverse, it sounds like a digital utopia and not sure how close we are to it. I would like my blog to be connected based on those ideas to other platforms, owning your content and being able to pull the plug when those platforms break your trust, sounds nice. Let me know if I’m preaching to the choir of if this is the first time you hear about RSS feeds or the fediverse.
Top Current Feeds:
I am looking for a good blog (with rss) on philosophy or stoicism. If you know one let me know.
M
MERIKKUMA 
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