RSS

Molly White wrote a fantastic article titled Curate your own newspaper with RSS.

She runs through the rise of email newsletters, Substack, why that’s happened with the Facebooks & Twitters Xs of the world deprioritising links to external sites, then how to go about trying out RSS:

I’ve been heavily using RSS for over a decade, and it’s a travesty more people aren’t familiar with it. Here’s how to join me in the brave new (old) world of RSS.

I’ve been using it for even longer, but with a hiatus caused by the same thing Molly mentioned - the death of Google Reader, followed by a “well I just get all my articles from Twitter now” phase - but have returned now to RSS. If you weren’t using it ten or twenty years ago, it might be very unfamiliar so her post is valuable.

The only two useful things I think I can add:

1. My personal choice of client is the latest version of Reeder. It makes RSS more enjoyable and ‘lighter’, ditching unread badges everywhere to chronological feeds that just remember where you’re at. Per blog, or any other collection you want to make. It also supports other content types but I prefer to consume them other ways mostly.
2. I don’t think she mentioned, you can also follow the RSS feed for any Substack. I’m somewhat surprised they do this given their business model, and maybe won’t forever but right now it works great (although I don’t know how well if it works for paid subscriptions, probably not well, it would need features like Passport for that).

I’d encourage you too to try RSS out. It’s such a better way to consume content that is interesting and useful. I don’t really use any of the other platforms anymore, the signal to noise ratio is so low and over time I found the most interesting people on Twitter or Threads or Bluesky write blogs, and it’s often a richer, more thought through and information dense form of what they talk about. Much signal, such less noise.