On RSS, and its continuing place in our lives.

So, this post landed on our Mastodon timeline a few days ago, and it got us thinking about RSS, our relationship to it, and about providing not just a list of our feeds but also where to find them.

Why we use RSS - Relatively Same Source

We’re not here to dwell on the past, but like a lot of other modern proponents of RSS, it all begins in the same place - Google Reader. It was an excellent way to keep up with webcomics and the like, and we branched out from there into keeping up with anything we were interested in.

After that died, we tried apps like Nextgen Reader (during the era of Windows Phone), Feedly, Flipboard, and NetNewsWire - but things kind of fell off after we started being more active on Twitter. It was still good for things like tech news, but for friends, we could just hit the 🔔 and be notified about every post! What could ever go wrong with this arrangement?

Well, even going back to 2018, some friends had moved to Mastodon as their primary social media even then, so we needed some way of keeping up with them when it was distinctly a second priority. But Mastodon has excellent RSS support, literally all you do is add .rss onto the end of a URL (more strategies for other sites further down)

And then, even pre-acquisition, we recognized that we were spending too much time on Twitter and that it would probably be healthier to cut back. To cut down on the amount of things seen algorithmically.

And like an old friend, RSS was still there. Still displaying things in the exact order they were timestamped.

How we use RSS - Reading Sequentially, Somewhere

Currently, we’re using Lire. It works across Apple’s platforms, and uses iCloud for syncing our list of feeds around without otherwise touching them so there’s no dependency on a service like Feedly (which given their recent pivot to “AI”, is a good thing). It has features we really like, like attempting to download the full text of articles for offline reading.

You know, for all those times we’ve been without internet access since the start of the pandemic.

Alternatives we looked at when making this decision included Reeder (Lire’s offline reading support sounded more comprehensive), and the Obsidian RSS plugin - but even as reliant as we are on Obsidian, that seemed like a bit of a bridge so far.

We’ve also debated setting up a Nextcloud instance and using that to sync feeds, but that also feels a bit… excessive for devices all on similar platforms. Maybe if we feel the need to access from our Linux desktop as well in future

Is RSS dead? - Rumours (of) Silence Sensationalized

No. RSS is fungal; as long as the open web still exists, you cannot kill it in a way that matters.

However, it is increasingly hidden, at least outside of podcasting. Few sites offer up their RSS link prominently any more, and browsers will often not handle it correctly (Safari on Mac and iOS, for example, will offer to open many feeds in Apple News, which cannot read them - Firefox lacks some of the feed discovery features that it used to have) But a lot of smaller sites still have more RSS support than you’d think, regardless of if they publicize it.

Podcasts are dependent on RSS, and we’re very much of the opinion that if there isn’t an RSS feed you can play the way you want in your favourite app, then what you have is a sparkling audiobook.
(They don’t need to be necessarily open to the entire web, for example, Patreon provides private feeds for audio creators you subscribe to - but the important part is that they’re downloaded to the app you want rather than having to use Patreon’s terrible player)

Some feeds to get started with - Reserved Space (for) Suggestions

Without listing everything we use, here are some things that may or may not be of interest, presented alphabetically.

This list does skew tech news heavy (and this isn’t even all the tech news sites we follow!), but this is about starting points - hopefully there’s something in here you might find interesting. We also have a lot of friend’s Mastodons and Cohosts in here to make sure we can keep up with the most important people, but none of those will be linked.

Maybe separately we’ll do a podcast roundup. Someday.

Name	Feed URL	Comments
BBC	here	The BBC has a lot of problems as an institution, but we unfortunately do still need some source of UK news, and it’s not like most of the others are much better. (Being honest, this is partially here out of inertia, an add during the Google Reader days, never removed)
Daring Fireball	here	If you’re subscribed to one Apple focused feed, it’s probably Daring Fireball; years of insightful commentary and reviews. It probably contributed to us moving to the Apple ecosystem. Speaking of…
David Smith, independent iOS Developer	here	David Smith is the developer of Widgetsmith and has done some neat articles on design principles for Vision Pro versions of applications
Eurogamer	here	Gotta have gaming news somehow as well, even if that means less time for playing them.
Obsidian Roundup	here	A collection of sometimes helpful things for Obsidian. (Like a lot of productivity advice/tools, it’s easy to go down a rabbit hole of improving your system and not actually doing the things you need to, so be careful)
Out-of-Placers	here	Webcomic that can have a transformative effect on some of those that read it. (Some pages may be NSFW)
Pokémon Go Live	here	Even if we give it less attention than we used to, it’s still nice to keep on top of what current in-game events are.
Rands in Repose	here	Engineering and management advice blog that we’ve been off and on reading since we were teens.
The Old New Thing	here	A Microsoft engineer since the Windows 9x days discusses the history of Windows and of minutiae of applications.
The Verge	here	General tech news.
Userlandia	here	A video series, podcast, and blog focusing on interesting retro computing hardware. (Disclaimer: we’ve known the author for years from previous projects)
Web3 is Going Just Great	here	Because sometimes you need a bit of schadenfreude about people actively trying to make the planet worse, and how easily they’re separated from both their Monopoly money and their real money.