What’s RSS? #

Uncontroversial take: social media is a problem. Social media under capitalism is designed to extract your attention in order to profit off of mass surveillance and advertising.

A couple of months ago, I attempted to transition my phone (and my brain) away from algorithmic feeds to cut down on my screen time as well as my digital footprint. While not entirely successful, I was able to completely get rid of Tik Tok and Twitter and reduced my use of Instagram down to less than a couple of minutes a day.

Instead, I found RSS (Really Simple Syndication). RSS is an open and standardized format for web publishers to share content. Similar to social media, RSS allows you to to ‘subscribe’ to blogs, news sites, youtube channels, podcasts and more. These ‘feeds’ auto update with the latest content from your sources. In contrast to social media, the open format means you can use whichever RSS reader software works for you rather than being locked into a specific app or website. Furthermore, you (rather than an algorithm) control what you see. An RSS reader allows you to curate your own personal newspaper with all your favorite local reporters, anti-imperialist bloggers and writers from the global south who are often buried beneath twitter on ‘social’ platforms.

A significant reason I stuck with RSS is because the writers I follow largely post long form content. Rather than flooding my social feed with instant (usually decontextualized and bad) takes, I have to wait for trusted sources to do their write-ups. I have found this shift to also push my thinking away from hot takes and towards a slower, more methodical analysis of the news and global events.

A second, and unintentional, upside of RSS feeds is that they end. Unlike the forever scroll of Tik Tok, a finite amount of content is posted by the various local news outlets, bloggers and journals that I follow. While I don’t always read everything every day, I am also not tempted to keep scrolling for another hit of dopamine. Furthermore, the RSS reader standardizes the text output of each feed. No matter the source, I get to read in the same font size, background color and text spacing. This both makes the text more accessible, but also hides all the other distractions ever present on webpages these days.

Overall, this shift away from profit driven algorithms and into RSS feeds has been very positive.

How to get started with RSS #

In order to get started following RSS feeds, you first need an RSS reader. I started with an iOS app called feeeed which emulates the social media timeline but populated by RSS feeds. For anyone on iOS and starting out with iOS I highly recommend feeeed. Here is a longer review at macstories.net

I eventually moved away from feeed because I wanted to use more free and open source software. As I have a personal server, I started to self host FreshRSS, an opensource, lightweight RSS feed aggregator.

NOTE: The following section will get a little bit technical in my own personal setup, feel free to skip down to see the RSS Feeds I check every day

There are a number of features of FreshRSS that I find indispensable. First, because it is hosted on my personal server, I have data sovereignty. For better (and maybe worse because I am not a data security expert) all of the data used by FreshRSS is controlled and hosted by me. FreshRSS also lets me sync my feeds and read articles across all of my devices. On android I am currently using Capy and on iOS I use NetNewsWire, both a free and open source RSS readers that can sync with my FreshRSS instance.

Unfortunately, a number of sites will hide the full text of an article from their RSS feed. A wonderful feature built into FeshRSS is the CSS Selector. This feature allows you to specify CSS tags to include and exclude. In practice, this lets you pull in the full article while excluding advertisements, newsletter sign ups and other extraneous information. While it takes a little more setup, I find the work invaluable. ¹

I am still looking for a way to sync my RSS feeds with my Kindle or Kobo (both jailbroken and running KOReader, but that’s another blogpost). I find the built-in KOReader implementation of a News downloader a bit clunky. However, FreshRSS does have the ability to aggregate RSS feeds you follow into a single new feed. In the future I may peruse this feature alongside the KOReader News downloader or separate KOReader RSS plugins

RSS Feeds I check every day #

Where RSS has really shone for me is in highlighting news and analysis from outside of the corporate, imperial media. The following are some of the RSS feeds that I have found particularly insightful or interesting.²

Unlike slogging through the endless advertisements on social media, curating feeds has become an ongoing project that I enjoy and learn from. Slowly, but surely as I get the itch to scroll for brain rot I have been retraining myself to check my RSS feeds for brain nourishment. I invite you to join me!