Controlling Your Own Media Consumption: RSS

What are feeds, why should you care, and how do you benefit? A somewhat living guide.

So, almost a decade ago I wrote an original post on tumblr (please don’t go looking for it) about how RSS feeds are not a dead technology. For a new decade and an increasingly awful landscape of the web, in the style of everything else lately, here’s a remaster of that original guide – because it’s as important as ever if we’ve got any hope of having a usable web going forward. I’ve been tweaking this slowly for a few months, and if I update it again I’ll post or something.

what’s rss?

You’ve seen that symbol before, yeah?

I mean, for one thing, it’s on a number of pages on this site in the navbar – But it’s the sign for Really Simple Syndication, a standard from about 20 years ago for finding out about updates on websites!

Over the course of this, I’m going to lie to you, just a little. I’m going to say and use RSS, almost exclusively. Most feed readers speak other, similar things, though! You’ll sometimes hear about Atom or jsonFeed – most places that offer “RSS” actually offer Atom! These are both newer formats that are “nicer” to read manually OR write… and utterly failed on the marketing side, both just reusing the RSS icon and having far more generic/descriptive names.

The best way to use RSS is with something called an aggregator! That’s a program that you load up with your choice of feeds (URLs of XML/JSON files) and it will go out and check them regularly for the updates, so that you don’t have to go check every single one of them over and over. There’s a lot of these, with the most famous probably being the now long dead Google Reader. Its death over a decade ago did not mean that the format died – just one client! There’s lots of other great software that fills the void, including my personal favorite Newsblur across the web and devices. Some other alternatives are Feedly (which has recently gone more in on “AI” so I’m skeptical), NetNewsWire for Macs and iOS, and even the email client Thunderbird.

Unlike Fediverse (ActivityPub, such as Mastodon) things, there’s no “push” function. Everything about RSS is simple enough that someone could read it without special tools or write it by hand. Servers don’t need to do anything complicated to provide feeds, aggregators don’t need to do anything complicated to read them. Servers aren’t wasting power or bandwidth copying posts over and over, “private” posts aren’t actually shared to every server in between, and nothing has to pretend to look like a Mastodon post to be understood by the network.

why bother?

If you’ve opened almost any social media platform lately, you’ve seen an algorithmic feed. Most platforms have switched to these as default, some of them have threatened to remove any alternatives, and some never had an alternative. These are a firehose of “content” – platforms trying to figure out what you won’t click away from, what’ll keep your eyes on their app so that you see more ads, so that they make more money off you – regardless of what they do to things like the truth, computer literacy, anything. Twitter, Facebook’s many properties, YouTube, tumblr, Tiktok, Github, and countless others are all incredibly guilty of this.

Usually, platforms have ways to follow people so that you, theoretically, see the things they post. Once upon a time, that meant you saw updates from your friends, you got an update when creators uploaded their one video a quarter, you found out when musicians you like had a new release without them having to spend additional money on advertising – it was great! You can still usually view “friends” or “subscriptions” but … features like lists or groups, features that made it easy to manage your OWN view, those keep getting de-prioritized, shuffled around, and made steadily worse. After all, you might run out of content, and then you’d leave the site – can’t have you stopping generating ad revenue for anything other than sleeping now, can we?

Some people have Newsletters, which send you an email whenever they update or want to make you aware of something. That’s okay, but newsletters aren’t perfect – if your email inbox is anything like mine, it’s just another source of notifications that you try to ignore because most of it is garbage, and it’s very easy for something to get lost in the weeds if you didn’t check it at just the right time. Maybe Gmail decides they sent a few too many emails and it “accidentally” started going to spam without you noticing.

I have bad news. Unfortunately, RSS’s no longer quite as awesome as the old days – a lot of these walled gardens (Facebook, Twitter..) don’t provide any way to do this anymore. They’re not the entire Internet, though! Social media sites can pretend they are as much as they like, but we can still use real websites (and plenty DO still provide feeds). News, comics, blogs, all podcasts (it’s true! they’re all RSS!), bands with their own websites, every Youtube channel, Nebula, Mastodon instances, Reddit, and so many more things still have support. Lots of new tools and sites are bringing them back, as well, as a part of trying to break away from old social media.

Aggregators let you put feeds into folders. They let you block tags, keywords, authors – you don’t have to be a programmer, hope someone else has made a browser extension, or beg the platform nicely to do it. No one knows if you unsubscribe, unfollow, whatever. There’s no signing up with your email on individual feeds, so no “oopsie doopsie we sold your email on accident enjoy the spam” happens. You won’t miss an update from that channel or friend that only updates once a quarter, because you didn’t happen to be online when they posted or it came in the middle of a bunch of email spam and now it’s buried forever.

how do i use it?

Okay, so, first off, pick an aggregator! I personally like web clients – a lot of them have apps for using on your phone, but it means you have access to all your stories wherever you go. Most browsers have extensions, Thunderbird works, and there are even other dedicated clients, but I’m going to focus on the web since it’s the most frictionless. Again, I personally use Newsblur, so it’s what I’m going to go over. I’m not getting any kickbacks here (I do subscribe to Premium), it’s just my personal favorite.

If you’re going to use a web client, I’d recommend also grabbing an extension like Want My RSS for Firefox or RSS Subscription Extension for Chrome. These bring back older functionality that used to show you the RSS icon in the address bar whenever the page you’re looking at has a feed available! This isn’t required at all, but it will make things so much easier to use.

That’s what it looks like in Firefox, for me. Other sites might have a link saying “RSS” or “Feed”. If you click on it, you should get taken to the XML of the feed – with the extensions above, it’ll show you a preview of the feed with a Subscribe button near the top. For Newsblur, that’ll take you over to here:

You can see that you can put in the URL of the site and what folder you want it to be in. Folders let you organize and view things how you want, such as having a personal feed of comics, news, etc. In the sidebar, clicking on anything filters to that view, either an individual site, a folder, or even “everything I’ve subscribed to” at once.

feed management

When you’ve got sites added, those other buttons at the bottom (below your feeds) next to the + become useful.

• All shows every site/feed you’ve added.
• The first grey dot shows unread stories.
• The green dot shows unread stories that you’ve marked as “Important” based on author, tag, source…
• The second grey dot is a little timer icon () and shows feeds with saved stories

Next up, also visible in the screenshot, are view buttons. These can either show you snippets of the original site, the abbreviated view of the feed, or only the text of the story. Further to the right, there’s some other customization of how you want the UI to look (columns, grids, font size, font) available as well.

When you click on an individual feed, you can also rename it, remove it, change its folder, or do some training to hide (or mark important) stories/tags/authors. This isn’t like social media, where the author will get a notice, though! If you don’t like something, you can just remove the feed, without worrying that someone’s going to notice and know you did it or that you ruined some metrics that are going to get someone fired or anything like that.

Actually, let’s talk a bit more about that training.

story management

Newsblur’s training is a pretty common style of feature in most aggregators. I’m a fan of it in particular, since it is “hardcoded” instead of trying to be clever.

You can make things as “Thumbs up” or “Thumbs down” – Thumbs up things can be shown specifically, thumbs down things will not be shown unless there’s also a thumbs up to balance it. You can still view them with the “hidden stories” toggle on top, too. The training dialog looks like this:

You can pick things in the titles, in the author field (for feeds that have multiple authors), or tags. You can also mark entire feeds this way, though I’m not sure why you’d thumbs down one instead of unsubscribing! It gives you options to curate your own experience.

okay, so I tried newsblur, it’s not for me, but the concept’s neat!

Great! That’s fine!

Most aggregators support something called OPML – it’s a file that describes all your subscriptions. You can import OR export your list with OPML to try out other aggregators really easily! In Newsblur, the export is on the Dashboard, under your user preferences. These aren’t some tricky magic, either – OPML files are pretty human readable! So if you’re feeling nervous about one or sharing your file with someone else, you could even remove it manually.

Your data here is yours. If Newsblur shuts down or you don’t like it, there’s other RSS aggregators out there. I’m not a huge fan of Feedly’s AI summary technology, but hey, if you want to try it out, the barrier to switching is pretty low. Thunderbird’s new UI doesn’t work for me, but it’s also had RSS support for ages.

what should i follow?

Well, that’s a bit harder to answer!

If you look over at Sources, you’ll see a (partial!) list of what and who I’m following. Comics, news, individual people’s blogs, Youtube channels, Nebula channels…

Newsblur can automatically add any Youtube channel, but it is possible to do so in other clients too. This article (please don’t click any links there, I use an adblocker and I’m certain it’s nasty if I were to disable it to check) has some details – it’s not too difficult! As it says, you just need to add https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELID, where you get the CHANNELID by looking in the source of a channel’s page for “browse_id”.

If you have any high volume channels you’re subscribed to on Youtube, this is a great alternative to having to try and look past all the Shorts that they cram into your subscriptions now, so that you actually don’t miss any uploads from smaller creators you care about. You can have specialized folders of feeds for your music, let’s plays, whatever – a level of control Youtube just does not want you to have.

I wish I could suggest more things, as I said – some new platforms are still adding RSS from the beginning, and sometimes individual aggregators can fake it with good API support. Always worth submitting support asks about it to let places know you care, might push it up or even onto some eventual roadmap.