RSS is so Cool...

I sometimes wish I had known more about RSS sooner… Before, I used to check a select few websites a day and always get lost in what I’ve already seen or not. If I wanted to keep up-to-date on something, I’d either subscribe to a newsletter they require me to put my email on, an app that just crammed ads and unrelated content or I had to store URLs of relevant tools in a note system of some kind.

I’m also someone who doesn’t really care about Social Media, even long before things went south: it’s a stressful place where you’re just fed more and more content to engage, react with very little time to think or reflect and it may not even be stuff you were looking for in the first place or want to see, pushed by recommendation algorithms that one may not be in control of.

It’s also a bad place to make meaningful content: it’s a global square where everyone is shouting over each other, either through a never-ending pressure for more likes, more views and more engagement to be relevant, all with context collapse, constant judgement and social pressures in conversations that maybe shouldn’t be public to begin with.

You don’t even have ownership over your account, your feed and what you write on it. Plus, if you try to leave due to a deteriorating service or due to exploitation from the company managing it, you have to start from scratch if you move to another place (unless you’re already on a Federated Social Media).

I decided to check RSS out after discovering the specification a while back and ever since then I…

• Read any source I want, whenever I decide, with zero hurry to read them.
• Follow more places than ever in whatever topics I’m interested in, even on Social Media like Bluesky and Mastodon!
• Look for RSS feeds whenever I see a well-crafted and interesting blog post, even if the topic is adjacent to something I care.
• Deal with less and less ads, clickbait, reactive posts and content I’m not interested in reading or watching.
• Reduce the number of distractions I have to deal with while reading.
• Know there’s an end to the content and I can do other stuff.
• Feel safe knowing that I’m not locked to any reader and that I can transfer the feeds I follow somewhere else or even share with others.

Most important of all: I’m the one who chooses when and how all of above happens: it’s not like I don’t engage with recommendation algorithms, but whether I want to engage on it or not, it’s an intentional decision that has a purpose and an intent.

Did you know that this website has an RSS feed as well? Subscribe to it and get more ramblings like this one… 😉

I was considering writing technical content in a platform like Medium to share knowledge, but as I read more and more people I followed talk explicitly about the advantages of making your own website, I decided to give it a try.

“But doesn’t it feel like you’re sometimes shouting at a void writing here instead of insert random Social Media platform here since you don’t know how many people read and/or liked it?” Yes! But that’s precisely what caused me to make one: free from the obligation of time tables (this post is out 2 weeks after the last one), I only reach the ones who actually wants to read my stuff, I own my content, there’s no noise to deal with, I choose when and how I post and there’s less pressure for me to write, making it easier for me to enjoy doing it (which, in turn, leads to better content overall).

Overall, RSS is an old-school approach that requires curation and a different mind as how you approach using it as both a reader and a writer, but one that has aged like fine wine and is well worth checking out in 2025.