Tom Burkert has a nice post in which he extols the virtues of RSS. You might wonder what there is to extol. RSS is a simple protocol—the “simple” is in its name, after all—and it’s pretty easy to implement. That and the fact that it was free and open source was why it beat the industry attempt to preempt and monetize syndication.
Like many people, Burkert started off using Facebook to locate and consume content but he soon found that Facebook was making choices on which content he should see that he didn’t agree with. The problem with Facebook and most other social media is that they consider you the product, not the customer. That means that everything they do is focused on increasing engagement and serving ads. You and your needs don’t matter at all, only your eyeballs do.
As Burkert says, the solution to the junk content and user hostile feed algorithms, ironically, predates social media. It is, of course, RSS. There are no algorithms mandating what you see: you are in complete control.
I, of course, use the excellent elfeed to read my RSS feed from within Emacs but you don’t have to be an Emacs user—Burkert doesn’t seem to be—to enjoy the advantages of RSS. There are plenty of RSS readers available for all platforms and despite Google’s attempt to kill RSS by abandoning Google Reader, the protocol is still in wide use because, it seems, not everyone likes being a product.
Take a look at Burkert’s post for more reasons that you, too, should embrace RSS and for some suggestions for getting started with RSS if you’re a new user. If you’re stuck on Facebook or some other social media for your content, you really need to take a look at his post. And if you’re an Emacs user you really need to check out elfeed. Take a look at these excellent videos [1, 2, 3] from Mike Zamansky if you want to learn more and see it in action.