RSS is cool
As of late, I’ve been diving into RSS feeds. I like and use Unread, simply because it is one of the few free RSS readers updated for Liquid Glass. It’s a great reader. I have deleted it a few times to detach myself from news, only to reinstall it back again. It’s just that useful. I can’t deny that I am interested some things on the internet, and those interesting things are on certain websites.
Compared to a single RSS feed, going to multiple websites, subreddits, and YouTube channels individually seems so…hard in comparison. If I want to get the pulse of the internet and what’s going on with my interests, all I have to do is launch Unread, have it refresh, go through the articles, read the interesting ones, and call it a session.
RSS is, by design, not addicting. Other news apps, like X (formerly Twitter), are social media and are addicting with the infinite scroll. RSS incorporates the “pagination” of the old internet, which is a quite anti-addiction design, which I like a lot. Also, I actually like how RSS reader rarely support expensive notifications, since that means I get to choose when to see RSS.
RSS is also better than Apple News or other news aggregators, due to you literally choosing every source that comes your way in RSS, compared to recommendations in news aggregators.
I also enjoy how RSS readers support the .opml format, which just feels good. I can easily export my subscriptions from one RSS reader to another one, or to a feed service or such. I love this ease of switching, which is rare for most services nowadays. Most services want to tie you into their stuff, and exporting is usually hard unless a dedicated switching service is there. RSS doesn’t need that!
In addition, I like the idea of a feed aggregator like Inoreader. Here, you can put your feeds into the backend feed aggregator, and connect any front end RSS reader to the backend. This mimics the functionality of the .opml file, since many RSS readers are compatible with the popular feed backends, except all you have to do is maintain the backend account and that feed.
The world of RSS is so fun! So much of the internet is secretly compatible with RSS feeds. Podcasts, subreddits, YouTube channels, Websites, Mastodon/Bluesky, and much more!
I love RSS!