remember RSS?

That universal subscription system a...

Posted by Madeeha Ghori on September 5, 2020

Remember RSS? That universal subscription system across the web? It’s actually still just as useful as before. Google Reader may have been a knock to its usage, but not to its publication.

Many sites and blogs across the web still publish RSS feeds. The New York Times has an entire page of RSS feeds you can subscribe to. Not to mention any local newspaper or tiny blog with a web presence. Maybe that’s the simplest pitch: your local newspaper plus your national newspaper in the same app.

But truly the universality of the protocol is pretty amazing. Heck, you can follow not just an RSS feed for a specific Tumblr blog, you can follow an RSS feed for a specific tag on a specific Tumblr blog. If you want to subscribe to famous author Diane Duane’s Tumblr, you can use https://dduane.tumblr.com/rss. And if you want to get an update every time famous author Diane Duane posts something with the tag “young wizards meta”, you can subscribe to: https://dduane.tumblr.com/tagged/young-wizards-meta/rss. It’s a beautiful system.

Even better, tools like Kill the Newsletter allows you to send those email newsletters that clog up your inbox to any RSS reader you choose.

While Google Reader may have killed consumer confidence that their favorite big companies will be willing to uphold the open source system, RSS is still an easy and extremely useful tool. For me, it enables me to send everything I actually want to read to one place. Otherwise, you have to open 5 different apps to see the tweets you want, the blogs you like, and the news you want. And then you gotta pray you don’t get sucked into an app rabbit hole and get distracted for like 5 years.

I’ve been using Tiny Tiny RSS for now, but there are plenty of other options as well. I even made a script that will send articles from my RSS feed to my Kindle so I can read long articles there instead of my phone.

Subscriptions are making a comeback, so why not RSS?

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