When you’re tired of all the advertising, surveillance, tracking, and invasive website modals and banners, you start appreciating how wonderful reading articles via RSS can be. Everything is preloaded, mostly text, and the layout is consistently usable across publications. The RSS reader app is by far my favourite way to read new articles.
Cory Doctorow, in his recent post entitled You should be using an RSS reader, pointed out the fact that the RSS “timeline” is indeed the inspiration for most social media platforms:
Your RSS reader doesn’t (necessarily) have an algorithm. By default, you’ll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.
Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.
On one hand, I fully agree with Doctorow: RSS is indeed fantastic, but on the other hand, it is a bit sad that RSS still needs to be explained and reintroduced to the world every couple of years when it has been here for years, free to use and available all along to anyone.
But where I don’t agree with Doctorow is in regard to newsletters:
Do you follow a bunch of substackers or other newsletters? They’ve all got RSS feeds. You can read those newsletters without ever registering in the analytics of the platforms that host them. The text shows up in black and white (not the sadistic, 8-point, 80% grey-on-white type these things all default to). It is always delivered, without any risk of your email provider misclassifying an update as spam.
If you subscribe to newsletters that resemble columns and articles, the ones that Doctorow refers to and what most modern newsletters are, RSS will indeed be a much better choice. I subscribe to a few of my favourite newsletters in that exact way. However, depending on the type of newsletters you read, I find that some of them simply look better inside an email client, whether it’s an app or an online inbox.
For newsletters like daily or weekly news updates, email is superior to RSS. These emails have more sophisticated layouts, and each email looks a little like a miniature front page of a newspaper or a magazine, which I like. Via RSS, most of this layout is lost, replaced by a basic text layout that doesn’t work as well in that case. At least that was the case for me; I’m sure some RSS readers manage to display emails properly.
That is why I organise my newsletter subscriptions into two categories, depending on their format and purpose: RSS newsletters for things that are like blog posts, but are not exactly blog posts (I know, it’s weird), and proper email newsletters, the ones that are basic HTML/CSS and feel like mini front pages (and also the ones that sadly don’t support RSS).
Speaking of email newsletters, I’ve recently found a new appreciation for them. Historically, I’ve always been “anti-email,” and for as long as I can remember in my web-centric life, I never really understood why email newsletters were still a thing when we had access to superior experiences with RSS and even social media timelines. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old, or maybe it’s because I already subscribe to more than 130 feeds in my RSS reader, but I now like getting the old-fashioned email newsletters, like I would receive my morning newspaper on my doorstep.
Laura Hazard Owen, on Nieman Journalism Lab:
I have resubscribed to print newspapers because they are finite; when you’re done, you’re done.
Exactly. This “finite” feeling is the one I get with email newsletters, especially news-centric ones. The Guardian Headlines daily newsletter is the best example of that. Every day at 6:30 in the morning — I’m an early riser — a badge notification appears on top of the icon of my Mail app. This email newsletter does a great job of curating what is important in the news today, as the Guardian homepage can be a bit too much to scan in the morning. When I’m done, I go back to my inbox, the badge notification disappears, and I move on with my day.
The benefits are obvious: no timeline, a limited amount of scrolling, less temptation to open a dozen background tabs than when I’m on the homepage, and less of a need to refresh websites and check the news again and again during the day, knowing that the next morning I will receive a new email like that.
And, cherry on the cake, to read this email I don’t need content blockers, I don’t need a special app, I don’t need to click on banners, I don’t need to log in, I don’t need to deal with JavaScript, I don’t even need to wait for the page to load when I open it. It all just works, right from an app that comes with my phone, where I can tune out most of the tracking and even use a “burner” email address if I want to.
The need for an extra app is probably the reason why RSS is not as popular as email newsletters, but the two technologies share many of the aforementioned benefits, and I like my current way of enjoying both in different ways, at the same time. Like I said, some newsletters work better in their intended email format, and clearly, if I were to receive more than a dozen email newsletters each morning, it would defeat the purpose and ruin the benefits of being able to cut through the noise, focus, and enjoy a “finite” amount of news.
For RSS, where I still rely on the “timeline” approach, things can be a bit tricky. Depending on how each person sets up their RSS feed, an incorrect time of publication or timezone can sometimes make me miss a post, appearing too far down the timeline. This is how it usually goes: a new post appears in my feed, marked as posted at “midnight” — usually the time of publication used by default — when it’s already three in the afternoon. If I’ve already mentally marked earlier posts as read, I may miss the post as I won’t scroll down past these items anymore.
I try to discipline myself by marking posts as read once I’m done — which can be done by simply pressing “L” in NetNewsWire — but I still happen to miss the occasional post. I know setting up a correct publication time on the RSS feed can be tricky: on the website itself, we usually don’t notice the exact time of the publication, just the date. I’ve struggled with times of publication and timezones quite a lot myself with Eleventy, but please double-check your RSS feed to make sure the RSS experience remains as flawless as possible for everyone.
