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The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds, social media and other forms of informational junk food. It is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and it is beautiful.
What the hell is RSS? RSS is just a format that defines how websites can publish updates (articles, posts, episodes, and so on) in a standard feed that you can subscribe to using an RSS reader (or aggregator). Don’t worry if this sounds extremely uninteresting to you; there aren’t many people that get excited about format specifications; the beauty of RSS is in its simplicity. Any content management system or blog platform supports RSS out of the box, and often enables it by default. As a result, a large portion of the content on the internet is available to you in feeds that you can tap into. But this time, you’re in full control of what you’re receiving, and the feeds are purely reverse chronological bliss. Coincidentally, you might already be using RSS without even knowing, because the whole podcasting world runs on RSS.
I love RSS! For the longest time I used Miniflux, and I still have an instance running, but lately I’ve just been using the Unread app on iOS. That’s one of the many great things about RSS: you’re not tied down to any specific app or platform, you can pack up and take your feeds wherever you want if you wanna try something different.
Seconding Miniflux! It’s my main RSS reader. I pay for the hosted version, it’s super cheap and works great. And since it’s simple HTML I can write Greasemonkey scripts to customize it a bit.
I love it! Even the built in CSS and JavaScript customization goes a long way. I’m not creative enough to figure out anything crazy with Greasemonkey lol