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.
The people aren’t there
The main problem, of course, is that most of the people that I want to keep in touch with (friends and family, particularly) don’t have a feed to follow. You may be one of them. If someone only uses social media to post, then I can’t subscribe to them via RSS. I still hop on social media a good bit, but ideally I’ll be escaping it more and more.
I still fully believe that more people should be blogging (the POSSE concept is perfect) simply for the fact that they can better own their content. However, regardless how easy it might be to set up a blog, publishing on social media will likely always be easier, and that’s where most people will default.
I still have a dream of someday having the “entirely of my internetting” filtered through RSS, but it’s unlikely to get 100% there. For now, I’ll keep pushing forward and keep moving more of it over a little bit at a time.
If you have a desire to get a blog going for yourself, reach out to me and I’ll be happy to get you pointed in the right direction.
I use my RSS feed everyday. That’s how I keep up with this and other blogs that I read.
Yep, it’s fantastic. My only problem, as I mentioned above, is that very few people publish this way, so escaping social media is nearly impossible for now.