Why we should all use RSS massively.
Oct 19, 2024 by Charly
Pros
Rock solid and Well documented
Created in 1999, Based on XML with a solid documentation (https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification)
Created and maintained by good people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
It does what it is supposed to do !
Display aggregated articles from your subscriptions
You control it
subscribe, unsubscribe, categorize
Logical sorting
Ordered by post date by default. No algorithm to hack your brain, No infinite scroll and bad patterns.
Categorize
Assign feeds in categories and find them easily
Easy to deploy
Plenty of software or apps, swith to them by transferring your configuration
Easy to transfer
All RSS aggregators uses the OPML xml format to export and import your subscriptions. No excuse finding a better rss aggregator.
No Tracking
No javascript tracking
No Ads
RSS feeds are 99% of the time a clean version of the articles.
Cons
Summarized
Sometimes, content of RSS items are truncated or summarized. Some aggregators try to recover the full content
UI/UX of mostly apps are 15 years old
Let them as good as a good instagram UI
Socials medias destroy the open source philosophy of RSS
Only youtube provide RSS feed of channels but facebook, instagram, tiktok, ... are closed and fight actively alternative ways of getting their contents ! People want contents aggregated.
Making the web better one site at a time, with a focus on performance and sustainability