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Filtering the entirety of my internetting through RSS
In an episode of the Cortex podcast (#122: State of the Apps 2022), one of the hosts expressed his desire (and near achievement) to “ filter the entirety of my internetting through RSS “. As that’s something I’m chasing as well, I thought it was an interesting statement and something worth unpacking a bit.
First, some of you may be confused by what he even means. RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) is a means in which to get feeds of data from websites. Not algorithmically-sorted feeds like on Facebook, but just a raw feed of information. In most cases, this is blog posts. If you sign up for an RSS feed from a blog you get every post of theirs. It’s fantastic.
This is something I’ve been writing about for nearly 14 years, and my RSS reader is still something that I use every single day. When I talk about things like controlling your inputs, this is a huge one. Rather than letting social media dictate what I see through a never-ending list of content, I can get updates from precisely the sources I want — no more, and no less.
In the past few years, I’ve been working to make my RSS feeds more personal — fewer companies and more humans. It’s been excellent.
