Marc Kydd has a post from last month that I’ve had in the queue to write about. His post is on why he still uses RSS. I’m always a bit surprised by posts like that because why wouldn’t you use RSS? I didn’t understand it back in 2017 and I still don’t.
After Google shutdown their RSS service—which I accessed through Reeder—and before I discovered elfeed, I used the feedly Web-based app and was very happy with it. Of course, once I discovered elfeed, I was even more committed. It brings the content from all the sites I’m interested in right to my Emacs instance. All of this is kept in a database that I can search in various ways even years after the content originally appeared.
Kydd says RSS has been replaced to some extent by social media. Many people are getting their news and content from Facebook and Twitter. That’s too bad because you don’t get the same content. Facebook and Twitter have algorithms that determine what content to show you. Most Irreal readers, I’m sure, are capable of deciding for themselves what they’re interested in and don’t need someone/something else deciding what they should read.
I see somewhere around 90 items a day in my feed. I look at each headline and the attached summary if there is one but don’t follow most items to their source. It takes only a few minutes to do this and I know I’m seeing all the content I asked to see. I also look at the Twitter status page for any tweets with the #EMACS hashtag but almost everything interesting I see shows up in my RSS feed anyway. Again, I don’t see why anyone who reads a lot of content on line wouldn’t use RSS.