Curate your own newspaper with RSS
RSS has been the future that just won’t die for 25 years -> Curate your own newspaper with RSS by Molly White
RSS is not sexy. It’s not cool. It’s anti-memetic. I would bet that 90% of Internet users have never heard of it. Even though, like email, they benefit from it everyday.
And what’s crazy is that with all kerfuffle of free speech and platforming and deplatforming and censoring on this platform and moderating on that platform…and then badgering people into subscribing to a billion newsletters…RSS still works.
But the surge in newsletters has been overwhelming. Whether it’s writers like me who’ve never worked in a traditional newsroom, journalists who’ve left or been laid off from traditional jobs, or established newsrooms entering the newsletter business, there’s a newsletter around every corner. Instead of subscribing to a single newspaper for columns and articles by a dozen journalists, now you have a dozen separate newsletter subscriptions, with articles appearing haphazardly in your email inbox amid bills, business communications, marketing spam, order confirmations, and two-factor authentication codes.
I use the FeedBro Add-On for my Firefox browser (but Chrome has plenty as does Safari, etc) Here’s what it looks like. It’s free. It’s simple. I keep up with a ton of websites for free, at my on pace, without clogging up my inbox. It works with someone’s random “substack” just as well as my local newspaper. The only “algorithm” is me. Sure, it’s not a polished as a giant Follow button, but it’s also not complicated either.
It’s like curating my own newspaper.
