Anecdata. I was hooked by RSS right from the outset in the mid-2000s. I used Google Reader for a bit and Netvibes for several years. It was amazing. This was the way the open internet was supposed to be. I had a dashboard to follow a whole bunch of cool sites and blogs, with not a scummy ad in sight. At one point there was even this cool tool whose name I forget which would filter RSS items, by means of multiple dials, based on their social-media buzziness. This was obviously a dangerous slope to be on, but at the time it felt safe enough and it was incredibly powerful at fine-tuning the signal. Again: all without any advertising or spying.

Then websites began to drop their feeds. Stuff began to break. I succumbed to the prevailing wisdom that RSS was on the way out, and tried other things. Lots of things, including Twitter and Pocket and Reddit and Google Alerts and probably even email at one point. Nothing came close to the functionality and freedom of RSS.

So, to cut the story short, I went back to RSS. It hadn't gone away after all. In fact, the rot seems to have stopped. Major blogging software like Wordpress still provides it, obviously. But so does Youtube, if you hunt a bit. Some news sites have even improved their offering. Maybe they finally grasped that RSS is like email: it's an ally against big tech domination. And for the rest there are now lots of tools to generate RSS feeds on the fly. Right now I use a modified Python script that does this for a couple of news sites I can't live without. It works great, although this is obviously not a solution for normies.

RSS is just an acronym but the principle is as relevant as ever. There needs to be an open standard for getting a summary of recently-published content on their web. RSS is the plumbing solution that works best and I hope it can be improved and made better still.