It's time for an RSS revival

The modern web has no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers to consumer platforms to YouTube comments, in general. Unfortunately, there is no panacea for the ills of this Internet we have built. But anyone weary of black box algorithms controlling what you see online has at least a respite, a respite that's been there all along but has often been ignored. Are you bored of Twitter? Facebook tired? It's time to get back to RSS.

For many of you, that means finding a replacement for Digg Reader, which broke down this month. Or maybe you haven't used RSS in five years, when Google Reader, the beloved firehose of news headlines, got the ax. For others, it means understanding what an RSS feed is in the first place – we'll get to that in a minute. And some of you have already moved on to the next article in your Feedly queue.

Whatever your current disposition, however, in this age of algorithmic overshoot, there's something deeply satisfying about finding stories beyond what your strongest shared Twitter follows, or that the Facebook News Feed has been optimized in your life. And many tools that can help you.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary) and it was first woven into the tapestry of the open web around the turn of the millennium. Its purpose is simple: to make it easier to track content updates for a given website in a standardized format.

In practice, and for your purposes, this means that it can give you a comprehensive and regularly updated overview of all the content your favorite sites are posting throughout the day. Think of it as the ultimate aggregator; every piece of every source that is important to you, is served directly to you. Or, more commonly, are fed to you through an intermediary known as an RSS feed reader, software that helps you bundle all those disparate headlines into something remotely manageable.

The difference between getting news from an RSS reader and getting it from Facebook or Twitter or Nuzzel or Apple News is a bit like the difference between a Vegas buffet and an a la carte menu. In both cases, you decide what you actually want to consume. But the buffet gives you a whole world of options you might never have seen otherwise.

"There are several approaches to connecting with news. Social seemed pretty interesting at first, but when you mix social and algorithmic, you can easily get into those noise bubbles, or areas where you you don't necessarily feel 100% in control of the algorithm," says Edwin Khodabakchian, co-founder and CEO of popular RSS reader Feedly. "A tool like Feedly gives you a more transparent and controllable way to connect to the information you need. need."

With 14 million users, Feedly is the largest RSS reader on the market. And it's easy to see why; it's as comprehensive as one would hope for and has been around since 2008. (It also inherited a significant portion of Google Reader's abandoned audience.) However, it's far from your only option.< /p>

All RSS readers work in the same basic scheme. You tell them which RSS feeds you would like to follow, for example The New York Times or WIRED, and they collect all...