On RSS

Sunday, 23rd June 2024

An excellent article this week by Joan Westenberg on RSS entitled RSS: The forgotten protocol that still matters.

It really identified for me one of the the key reasons that I wanted to make this website. Apart from the whole slowly learning to code thing. I'm 48 and didn't grow up on the internet, but most of my adult life has been spent co-existing with the internet. My first experience of the internet was in the late 1990's and whilst at university. I didn't have a dial-up connection at home, and didn't get a broadband connection until buying my first house in 2003. Broadband back then being a 512k Telewest connection!

In that time I've been through the rise of the internet giants, Google, Meta, Twitter etc. And increasingly I like what I see and experience of those companies less and less. In particular the idea that your online identity is expressed through and by those companies. And conversely that your online self can be shaped by what these companies want to show you. People joined Facebook, originally, to connect with friends. That now seems an almost forgotten element of the platform amongst the deluge of ads, viral content, clickbait and listicles. Twitter is increasingly a ghetto of right-wing crackpot, crypto bros and MLM dross. Instagram started off so promisingly, a way to share and explore photography from around the world, and is now just two-week old TikTok reposts. It's all just … ugh.

This passage especially sums up that problem, and why RSS is such a useful escape from it;

When you rely solely on social media algorithms to determine what appears in your feed, you are giving up control and relinquishing your attention to platforms designed to monopolize as much of your time and consciousness as they can get away with. RSS readers put you in the driver's seat. You decide which information sources are worth your time and attention. You pull content to you, rather than having it pushed on you based on what some company has determined is likely to keep you scrolling.

I don't want an algorithm feeding me. I want my feed to be things I'm interested in, from interesting people, taking about interesting things. And that's why I too love RSS, and am glad that it's not going anywhere, even if it's not and probably never will be mainstream. And if I'm going to put things - myself- on the internet, I think I'd rather have ownership of how I do that.