Long live RSS
The way we discover and consume content on the internet has changed radically. It's not only a story of progress, and I wanted to write a praise for an old technology that still has a lot to offer today: RSS.
RSS is a web feed1 that allows you to be notified when a new post has been published and receive a copy of it in your feed reader of choice.2
Whenever I encounter a patch of the Wild Wild Web that I find rare, special, and worth remembering, I subscribe to it. My feed reader regularly checks if a new post has appeared in any of these places and collects them. Whenever the time is right, I can immerse myself in this writing, and my feed reader allows me to customize the experience to my preferences. There's no clutter or noise, no phantom obligations.
The garden of writing that I have collected, of course, needs tending. If it grows too big, it becomes cluttered and overwhelming. Maybe I need to make some space by marking some posts read, or maybe I need to unsubscribe from a feed entirely. Each post deserves a certain amount of attention, and if I can't dedicate that, I need to let it go. I have also found that there's a sweet spot in terms of frequency for the feeds I subscribe to. If posting frequency is too high, I have to consider another way of consuming the content.
Why am I so fond of this technology? Because it has the convenience of a push technology (I'm not doing the surfing), yet I, a human, carefully curated the content. There isn't an endless amount of content to scroll through, and it's sorted chronologically. There are no hidden intentions, no stealing of data, and no targeted ads. That's beautiful.