RSS could be so much better
I think RSS could be really impactful in improving media literacy and critical understanding of our world, but RSS is not integrated into any part of our society (as far as I know), except some niches for jobs or nerds.
I've had a few rounds with RSS before but found myself burnt out and unsatisfied with it.
Recently, it's been different.
Tldr; I want to be able to tell my mom to go download [Such and Such App] for her news, and her be able to choose which outlets and which official sources to follow. It should be easy, and it should be searchable. Further, businesses, governments, and schools should adopt RSS.
How I use RSS now
I keep up with the AllSides feed, so I feel like I have a good surface-level knowledge of daily news.
I've also added feeds for U.S. bills introduced in congress & one for bills in my state. Another for official press releases from the Whitehouse.
And my new favorite use is Youtube feeds! I have a group of feeds for woodworkers, a group for Wirtual, a group for other gamers, a group for yappers, and so on.
When I know what kind of content I'm in the mood for (such as woodworking or Wirtual before bedtime), I go to the RSS reader (Feeder) instead of the Youtube Algorithm or search. It's really nice.
Why RSS is important
RSS is a long-supported standard that many sites implement, and it is really easy to create an RSS feed (from a programming perspective).
RSS puts you in control of who you follow & what you're exposed to. An algorithm doesn't determine which channels or content you will see.
You'll still be influenced by thumbnails and titles & the content selection of producers/publishers, but it's much more on your own terms.
I think mass adoption of RSS could be critical just because of this sense of control and the removal of gatekeepers.
Motivation for this post
This blog post was triggered by thinking about my schooling as a kid. I didn't learn about ideas outside the mainstream. I didn't learn what socialism is. I didn't learn the history of people critical of the United States government.
I feel like I was taught a pro-America version of history.
And motivated by my ongoing frustrations with media and political messaging. I've seen so many teardowns of Project 2025 on YouTube and Harris has mentioned it multiple times.
I haven't seen any teardowns of the 2024 GOP Platform, or Trump's official platform messaging from his own website.
Plenty of the policy positions they claim to hold are not good and should be attacked, but Dems and liberal media (at least in my algo bubble) are too busy attacking the boogeyman of Project 2025 to attack the actual party platform.
Or the fact that only the Dem & Republican candidates are covered by mainstream and promoted. When Harris was interviewed, she was asked about Trump's statements, but not a single question about Jill Stein.
What's a more important question:
- What do you say about Trump saying you're not black? (this was asked)
- What do you say about Jill Stein (Green Party Presidential Candidate) accusing Democrats of being a fascist threat? (this was not)
So if we were all better-equipped with RSS, and had feeds for differing viewpoints and things outside the mainstream, then I think we could really move American political consciousness forward a bit.
My media consumption has become more diverse and critical over the last year or two (I was once stuck in an online leftist bubble).
RSS is a really big part of my recent gains in this area, and my sense of control as a media consumer.
I want others to make similar progress in this area of media literacy.
Where RSS falls short.
A lot of places.
1. It's clunky and awkward and technical and the apps suck.
I like Feeder alright, but it's still a very MEH app in so many ways. It lacks features listed below, and I can't even re-organize my list of feed groups.
2. Content curation is nice.
I still scroll YouTube for algo-based recommendations. I do want content curated for me, and the algorithm does a really good job of showing me new stuff that's cool.
I still think content curation should exist, both driven by algos and by human curators. I don't think anybody should abandon apps or feeds that they like. I think RSS should just also be part of common-knowledge the way Google and Facebook are.
And RSS could help with this. A single app could have an offline algorithm for content recommendation from all of your feeds. 'Most Recent' is my main preference, but having a "Recommended" feed is great & RSS apps should add that.
Further, online services could be created that provide these algorithm feeds via RSS (preferably an authenticated RSS). I'd like to use my RSS app to see what the YouTube algorithm is recommending for me specifically.
3. Search
It is outside of the scope of RSS to automatically crawl pages & index their content for search. But this would be incredible.
Imagine you have a 'News' feeds group, with subgroups 'Right', 'Left', and 'Center'. In 'Right', you have Fox & New York Post. In 'Center' you have The Hill & idk who else is center. In 'Left' you have CNN & ABC & Mother Jones.
(Okay, CNN is not LEFT. They're liberal & LEFT is not liberal but whatever, you get the point.)
And then you get curious about 3rd-party candidates, and you wanna search your chosen personally-curated bubble for information.
You don't wanna search the entire internet. You want to search the outlets you know, the ones you trust (Or maybe know to be critical of).
If every RSS app on everybody's phone individually did this scraping, it would be a high technical cost & I don't like that. I think online services to provide this would be better from a technical sense, but worse from an ownership sense.
I don't care though, the point is that being able to search specifically within all my feeds would be great.
Having advanced search controls to filter just by title, or by content, or 'search synonyms' or whatever would be awesome. Having filter-buttons for which of your outlets/feeds to search within would also be great.
4. Groups & Subgroups
Idk about other apps, but 'Feeder' allows me to 'Tag' a feed, which basically is just a way to group it with other feeds.
For me, all 3 Wirtual channels are tagged with 'Wirtual', so they are under a single group.
But I'd rather have a 'Trackmania' group with a 'Wirtual' subcategory & then his 3 feeds (not including clips) would be under the 'Wirtual' subcategory.
So if I wanted to watch any TM content, I'd go to the TM group & I might watch Wirt or Scrapie or Granady or Spammie or PhilTM or Mudda.
But I usually just wanna watch Wirtual. And I don't want to have a 'Wirtual' group AND a 'Trackmania' group on the same level.
(also, I want a parent 'Youtube' group, with a sub-group Trackmania, then another subgroup for Wirtual).
5. Community
Social media has commenting. There's a way for me to engage and feel like I'm doing something (even if it's bullshit).
I'm not sure how to solve this. I think share integrations, maybe? Or have some kind of public forum for RSS where basically people can talk about a given link, or maybe a topic (i.e. do we want comments on the CNN coverage of the Trump Assassination attempt, or do we want comments about the assassination attempt itself).
And that public forum could be subscribed-to via RSS. Idunno man. Lack of community is maybe a problem with RSS, but it also might be good that the social features are removed from RSS.
I don't want a false sense of importance driven by seeing that a lot of people have engaged with a story that just isn't materially impactful.
Also, I want tie-ins to advocacy. That's more the journalism side, but anyway here's the idea:
Story about Walmart dicking over consumers? Provide contact information for consumer complaints with the gov, and for customer service with walmart.
Story about a bill in my state that would ban lab-grown meat? Give me contact info for the Governor, for my State Reps, and my community's forums - like Letter to the Editor in the local paper.
6. Permanency
RSS Feeds typically don't let you get or keep everything. Some feeds will only give you like the last 10 or 20 articles. Feeder has a default limit of 100 articles stored for a given feed.
If I subscribe to a CNN feed today, I won't get articles from a year ago (pretty sure). So in that respect, if I used a 'search within my feeds' feature, I'd miss anything older than when I first subscribed to an outlet.
7. Adding Feeds
You gotta visit a website & get the RSS link & then go to your app & click add Feed & do a couple steps of setup. It sucks.
Mobile browsers should have a 'Feeds' option to see RSS feeds available from major websites (some are listed in HTML Markup, but other lists of feeds may need to be curated).
Apps should have feeds available within them. Like I should be able to add a 'News' feed group & it'll already have curated lists for 'liberal', 'conservative', 'left', 'center', and others. And then I could just click through the ones I want instead of seeking out every freaking link on my own!
8. Money
If you read articles inside your RSS app, you probably don't see any ads, and you probably get around paywalls.
I hate the paywalls on journalism, and I don't like the advertising.
But news rooms and other content creators need to get paid so they can survive and have some quality of life.
But WE should also get access to information & I shouldn't be excluded from democracy because I'm dirt poor (which I am).
So I don't have a clue how to solve that problem in the current economic system, or how RSS could work in that space.
9. Capitalist bastardization
If RSS took off the way I want it to ... You know people would be trying to squeeze the money out of it & silo us the same way social media does. So idunno about that one. I think RSS's standardization would hopefully be able to defeat this problem.
How to bring about mass RSS adoption.
Students in schools are already indoctrinated into technology. As it stands, that's Apple iPads, Google Classroom, and surely other mainstream products.
School districts should bring RSS in.
Teachers should publish assignments as RSS Feeds. School Boards should publish meeting announcements and documents to RSS. Student's individually-graded assignments should go to an authenticated RSS feed.
The backend service to manage those assignments and announcements doesn't really matter. RSS normalizes it and prevents siloing, and this RSS approach would introduce kids to RSS.
Business and governments (including city councils!) should use RSS for announcements to their workers (& the public!) instead of having in-house messaging systems like Slack or whatever. (Perhaps Slack could provide the backend service for posting announcements, but then workers would view said announcements via an authenticated RSS feed provided by Slack.)
We are indoctrinating children into technology. We can't avoid it. When I was a kid, it was text books and calculators and pencils and notebooks. Today its iPads and Google Classroom and the internet. Tomorrow, could it be RSS?
And email announcement feeds should be RSS-first. Heck. Social media should be RSS first. I want a service where I post my announcements & then it goes out to RSS, to Facebook, to Twitter, to email, and wherever else my announcements need to go. But RSS should be first.
Small nonprofits could get in on this RSS thing.
Some of these societal-approaches to widespread RSS adoption could be done now with the current infrastructure and apps available. But it could be hugely enhanced by some of my other ideas here.