Get Your News the Old-Fashioned Way with RSS
WITH THE RECENT concerns about privacy on social media platforms and other “free” services, it doesn’t hurt to look at your options. And if you use social media to get your news, there’s a free alternative that’s been around for a long time: RSS.
Really simple syndication is one of those seriously useful technologies that has somehow fallen out of favor in the past couple years. In the face of social media and the ever-broadening encroachment of big platforms on the web, it can be tough to find the stuff you want to read.
Last month, I explored the ways that someone could go about hosting (read: paying for) their own core services, such as email. I said there isn’t a clear replacement for sites like Facebook, but given that so many people get their news from social media, there is an open and standards-friendly way to replace at least some of that functionality.
News and information bubbles have always been around in some form. Some people prefer the Wall
StreetJournal to the NewYorkTimes, for example. But algorithms created by big companies—most notably Facebook, Google, and Twitter—shape what articles we see. In essence, we’re letting AI decide which articles are important to us.
For the publishing industry, this has long been a problem. There aren’t a lot of readers who go straight to the front page of their local paper. Instead, stories are usually spread through social media. This led to the industry-wide adoption of cheap headlines and quick articles.
For the reader, this means the news you see in Google Now or on your news feed is a function of your interactions and search history. What you lose out on are the stories that aren’t designed to be virulent. Niche stories can get lost, effectively thrown into the memory hole by algorithms. And as someone who sees how hard people work on stories, that really sucks.
Enter the trusty RSS feed. RSS has been around for ages. The technology enables you to subscribe to a feed, be it a podcast or news website. Some news websites go so far as to have an RSS feed for each section. Depending on the backend software running the site, you may even be able to follow your favorite writers’ posts. All you need to take advantage of RSS is a feed reader of some kind.
RSS is a pretty simple technology. A feed is little more than XML containing the title and summary of an article. RSS feeds are capable of delivering the full-text content of an article at the publisher’s discretion as well. (For the most part, blogs generally provide full text, while most news organizations would rather you view the story on their website.) As a result, RSS is a very open and easily interpreted format that nearly any software can be designed to read.
If there’s one thing to know about feed readers, it’s that there’s no shortage of them. One of the leaders in the RSS space is the freemium service Feedly. Feedly is nice, but there’s a ton of self-hosted and desktop RSS solutions as well. Tiny Tiny RSS is a lightweight, selfhosted alternative, for example. (You can even theme it to look like Feedly, if you prefer.)
Desktop apps are plentiful, too. Most mail applications, such as Evolution or Thunderbird, have some rudimentary RSS reader functionality. Dedicated reader apps are the better way to go, though. FeedReader is a GNOME application that can connect to different webbased readers or aggregators, such as Feedly or Tiny Tiny RSS.
The great thing about choosing an RSS application is that you rarely have to stick with that choice if you don’t like it. Most RSS applications allow you to export your feed lists as OPML files.
Regardless of whichever app you choose, you bask in the knowledge that RSS can deliver content to you without the cruft of social media-induced advertising. You’ll also be doing the outlets you like a service as well—you’ll provide loyal readership.