opinion A couple of timely blog posts remind us that RSS is alive, well, and can help you resist enshittification of the Web.
Last week, Caroline Crampton’s blog post, The View from RSS really caught our attention, helped by its subtitle: What the web looks like when you subscribe to 2,000 RSS feeds. We were not the only ones who it grabbed: at the weekend, Cory Doctorow also picked up on it in a post called The web is bearable with RSS.
One of the snags of reporting on the tech sector is tackling the constant stream of announcements of radical new technology that is going to change everything. Another, of course, is trying to find out about them via websites in the 2020s, where even with an in-browser ad-blocker, plus a network one too, and an anti-cookie warning extension, many websites are still horribly cluttered.
So when someone following two thousand feeds tells you that an RSS reader can strip a lot of the cruft away, and a caped crusader of the blogosphere agrees … well, this vulture sits up and pays attention.
The origins of the RSS system go back to the 1990s, and like the Markdown markup language we reported on earlier today, the RSS 1.0 standard was co-developed by the late Aaron Swartz when he was just 14 years old.
Even 21 years ago, The Register was reporting public unawareness of what RSS could do. That started to change a couple of years later: in 2007, Mountain View introduced Google Reader, an online RSS aggregator. Accessible from any computer, it let users pull together all their RSS feeds and aggregate the results.
It was good enough that it largely obliterated a lot of other RSS syndication tools. So – tell us if you saw this coming – Google shut it down in 2013. It is still missed – The Reg ran a retrospective a decade later.
This vulture was a regular user, and when it went away, I largely stopped using RSS myself. As such, Crampton’s article really struck a chord.
As it happens, I already had an RSS reader installed. Regular readers may have noticed our fondness for MZLA’s messaging client Thunderbird. Late last year, I reported that it had gained native Microsoft Exchange support, but I’ve been endorsing it for years. So I configured the feeds of some of the sites we regularly visit and gave it a try.
It does the job, and if you live in Thunderbird it’s more than adequate, but I wanted to see what else was out there. For Apple users, NetNewsWire has an excellent reputation. The slight snag is that the current version needs macOS 15, which my elderly iMac is too geriatric to run without assistance. However, the project also offers old versions for download, and version 5.04 worked a treat.
On Linux, I tried gFeeds, but as with many apps that are designed for GNOME, I found it a little too simple for my taste: for instance, the list of sites you’re following is hidden in a pop-up sidebar. Thanks to the OPML interchange format it took under a minute to export, transfer, and import dozens of feeds, though.
Next, I tried Liferea. (Apparently, the name is short for LInux FEed REAder, and it’s pronounced “lie-fer-ee-yah” and not “life-area” as we’ve been saying for years.)
There are lots to choose from out there. On KDE, there’s Akregator, which also has a Windows version, and Windows types have FOSS options too.
It’s only been a few days so far, but I am really enjoying the experience. It’s much quicker to tab through a list of feeds than separately open a double-digit number of sites in different tabs, then go through them and open stories in more tabs.
RSS is one application of the nearly 30-year-old resource description framework, and RSS itself has a successor format called Atom. Any modern reader should just sort this stuff out for you, though.
The RSS standard has its own logo, showing two waves emanating from a dot at bottom left. Because this is quite old tech now, some sites no longer advertise it, but if you can’t find an RSS feed displayed, then look for one using your preferred search engine. Pretty much every site seems to have one.
The Reg itself naturally offers its own list of feeds. Because it wasn’t immediately obvious to us, we feel we should point out that the bold heading saying The Register above the list of channels is also a feed address, for the site as a whole. Right-click any of the headings, pick “copy link” and paste it into the feed reader of your choice.
This author has a slight guilty feeling of bumping into an old friend who we’ve neglected for a decade, but so far, we are very much enjoying getting re-acquainted. ®