RSS
Before doomscrolling was a thing, I remember the feeling of having to clean my RSS feed from unread items. I belong to this community of zero inbox email, and RSS feeds could not escape. Obviously there are a lot of ways to absorb information and “read the news” - if there is such a thing still relevant today. My preferred way is RSS.
RSS - RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication is essentially a feed or stream of links that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. It’s one of the still many remnants of the open web of the early days. A younger co-student once asked me, “Where do you live in the 2000s?” What struck me was that she was aware of the protocol’s existence, not that she mentioned my age.
I am a web boomer, and I remember looking for the orange “radio waves” icon at the websites that drew my attention. It became an instinctive way to navigate the digital, non-tangible world, and I’ve practiced this way of navigating so much that it feels like breathing or walking. My aggregated feeds combine art, blogs on science and technology, international and local news, programming and hardware-oriented feeds among others.
But this is not a post for the good old days. It seems that RSS is gaining traction once again. Caroline Crampton’s The View From RSS and Cory Doctorow’s web is bearable with RSS, both make the case for RSS. The Death of Social Media is the Renaissance of RSS makes a strong case for why. The algorithmically curated streams of social media messed with AI-generated content is an incredibly boring combination. It’s like comparing overprocessed food to freshly cooked meals - it demands less, but the outcome is not the same. Cherry-picking sources from streams and blogs that have a distinct way to interpret reality is a tedious process but too often pays back.
I saved another point in defence of RSS for last. Raw and open content appears to be increasingly important to AI, automated scrappers, and humans. In fact, without the open web and pirated data contemporary AI would not exist. Paywalls and social platforms have accumulated valuable content over the years, which remains inaccessible to everyone (or every agentic system) for exploration and/or mutation. This could actually be a great opportunity to push for a more open web.