Using RSS for a Calmer, More Personal Internet Experience

    We all know the feeling. It's 11pm and you're watching youtube. You don't really want to be watching youtube but you've found yourself there again. 'Just until the end of this video', you think, but then interesting post-video recommendations hook you again and again and suddenly it's 2 am and you're in a spiral of exhaustion and self loathing. Or, more likely, that's just me. But surely I'm not the only one who feels a loss of control of my internet experience due to recommendation algorithms. Every major social media site and news site has one, ensuring that you can never only do what you came there for and you'll spend way more time on the site than you bargained for, giving them even more time to track your preferences and serve you ads. Surely the internet doesn't have to be this way, does it?  Well, you can't exactly control the internet (besides contributing to it using design standards you believe in!), but you can definitely adjust your user experience. 

But What is RSS?

    Well, here's the truth: RSS is a 20+ year old web technology with a complicated development history that fell out of mainstream use in the early 2010s, and there's not even full agreement on what the abbreviation stands for. But don't go yet! It's also completely free and easy to use. At its core, RSS allows you to subscribe to content (think: newsletters, blogs, podcasts, forums) and receive an update every time there is a new post. That means you get exactly the content you want to see, when you want to see it, and nothing else.

    If RSS is this great, you may ask, why have I never heard of it before? I think there are two main answers to that question: it's free, and companies can't easily use it for targeted advertising or tracking. RSS has no support for the user metrics software that's commonly used in email newsletters and websites. Because there's no financial benefit to companies having an RSS feed, they don't see the point in advertising it for their users. 

Sounds Complicated...

    It's a bit more complicated than a social media feed or signing up for an email newsletter, but there's no coding or fancy computer skills required. I can even walk you through it right now!
    

Step one (click to expand) is finding an RSS reader.

This will allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds and view them all in one place. Because RSS is open source, there are a huge variety of readers available with different features, some of them free and some paid. For example, some readers may allow you to sync content between devices, automatically find feeds for you, or set up rules for filtering content. For this tutorial, I'll be showing you how to use Feedbro, not because I think it's the best reader out there, but because it's a free browser extension for edge and firefox that I personally use. The first thing you'll want to do is search for feedbro and add it as a browser extension for the browser you're using. To access feedbro after adding it, go to your extensions menu and click on its icon, then "Open Feed Reader". Congratulations, you now have an RSS reader!

    

Step two (click to expand) is adding feeds to your reader.

If you don't know what feeds to add yet, don't worry - I talk a bit about that in the next section. The main way to add a feed is going to the site you want to subscribe to and looking for an RSS or Atom link. On large/popular sites, it's generally at the bottom somewhere. You'll also want to learn what the RSS symbol looks like: . Sometimes the symbol will be used by itself. If you click on the link/symbol, your browser might open a page of code or try to download a file. Don't be afraid; just right click on the link/symbol instead and select 'copy link'. In Feedbro, you can add a feed by going to the feed reader and clicking the RSS symbol with a + in the top left corner. Then paste the link you just copied and click 'load', name it something you'll understand later, then 'save'. You should now have an RSS feed! If you don't, don't panic, feedbro has an easier way to add feeds too. Just go to the site you are interested in, click on the extension, and select 'Find Feeds in Current Tab'. Then, select the feed/feeds you want to subscribe to, name the feed and click 'subscribe'. If feedbro couldn't find any feeds, that's okay - not every site has a feed available.  

    

Step three (click to expand) is reading your feeds.

To do this, you can just go to the reader and select a feed. In some cases, there might not be anything in the feed yet, but for most sites you'll be able to see a certain number of past entries. In feedbro, you can adjust what the feed looks like through the buttons in the top right corner .  If you end up with a lot of feeds, you can sort your feeds into folders, and if you end up with one feed with too much content, you can use rules to filter it or mark it as read automatically, like email. You are now ready to explore the world of feeds!

 

Great, but what do I actually use it for?

    I can't tell you exactly what to use RSS for, but it might help if I tell you about how I use it. I actually started out by using it for my youtube subscriptions to get rid of the youtube algorithm, but that's a bit complicated, so I'll talk about it later on. If you listen to any podcasts, those are very likely to have an RSS feed if you go to their website. Blogs almost always have one. I do- you can subscribe to me if you want! Many news sites still have RSS, but you'll want to be careful to avoid getting overwhelmed since they tend to post a lot. Reddit allows RSS, but only has a feed of the latest posts without any kind of 'hot' or 'top' filtering, so I only subscribe to one smaller subreddit. I also realized I could subscribe to email newsletters through RSS which was very exciting - I prefer to keep my emails to a minimum, and I generally see email newsletters when I don't have time to read them. You can do this for free through Kill The Newsletter, if the website you're using accepts automatically generated email addresses, but migrating newsletters you're already subscribed to is more complicated. I would tell you how to do it except I haven't tried yet.

Sidebar (click to expand): How I ported my youtube subscriptions to RSS

You can subscribe to any individual youtube channel through RSS, although the link to do it isn't available on the channel page. You can use feedbro's find feeds in current tab feature, or you can build the link yourself using a tutorial online. But if you're like me and already have 50+ youtube subscriptions, that definitely isn't something you'll want to do for each individual channel, and youtube doesn't provide an easy way to export subscriptions. Luckily, there is an online tool to do this, but youtube has been known to change their code over the years so I don't know if it will work forever. I also don't know whether the tool is fully trustworthy, but I have used it and it worked perfectly and nothing bad happened. Also, interacting with code a tiny bit is required. It can be found here: Youtube Sub Download Tool. If you're using feedbro, once you have the OPML file from the tool, you can go to feedbro settings and select 'Import Subscriptions (as OPML)' and upload it. You should then have all your subscriptions in RSS.

 

Are there any downsides?

As with any technology, there's a few. Not all websites support RSS, so you'll probably still need to use other ways to update yourself. Particularly, Instagram and Facebook do not support RSS (I wonder why!), and neither does twitter. When you use an RSS feed, a creator doesn't get support from ad revenue, so you'll probably want to support them in other ways if you can. And, RSS doesn't automatically port between devices, although some readers allow this to happen, so if you switch devices a lot that may be frustrating. 

Can I make an RSS feed myself?

You can! RSS uses the XML markup language. Here's a tutorial that explains it: W3 Schools XML RSS Tutorial. To add the feed to your reader, you'll need to host it somewhere online. Neocities allows you to do this, but note that anyone could find it. I have a feed on my website that only I subscribe to that just has some notes in it. If you blog, most blogging websites (including this one) will generate a feed for you, but if you have coded your own website, you'll have to make your own feed too.