nomass

RSS

Molly White wrote a fantastic article titled Curate your own newspaper with RSS.

She runs through the rise of email newsletters, Substack, why that's happened with the Facebooks & Twitters Xs of the world deprioritising links to external sites, then how to go about trying out RSS:

I've been heavily using RSS for over a decade, and it's a travesty more people aren't familiar with it. Here's how to join me in the brave new (old) world of RSS.

I've been using it for even longer, but with a hiatus caused by the same thing Molly mentioned - the death of Google Reader, followed by a "well I just get all my articles from Twitter now" phase - but have returned now to RSS. If you weren't using it ten or twenty years ago, it might be very unfamiliar so her post is valuable.

The only two useful things I think I can add:

  1. My personal choice of client is Reeder Classic. I wanted to support them by trying the new Reeder but it really wasn't my cup of tea. Like the popular Current that came later, they both try to fix problems that I realised I don't really have perhaps, and in ways with too many compromises. Simple is better.
  2. I don't think she mentioned that you can also follow the RSS feed for any Substack. I'm somewhat surprised they do this given their business model, and maybe won't forever, but right now it works great for free sites. For paid stuff no one I'm aware of does this well, except Ben Thompson with Passport.

RSS is such a calmer way to consume content that is interesting and useful. I try to avoid the social media platforms these days. Sometimes I miss that sense of swimming in the stream of what is happening right now, but the signal to noise ratio is so low. Over time I've found the most interesting people on Twitter or Threads or Bluesky or Linkedin also write their own blogs, giving a richer, more thought through and information dense form of their ideas. More signal, less noise.

I'd encourage you to grab a copy of Reeder Classic, or NetNewsWire (which is having an interesting rebirth) or anything else you like the sound of, load up some of the things you already like to read and try RSS out. If you want some suggested feeds, you can also check out my blog roll for ideas, or import them all with the opml (another nice feature of rss readers generally).