- Cory Doctorow: You should be using an RSS reader. Almost a year old, but an important preamble for what’s below, especially if you only have a vague idea of what RSS stands for.
- Buttondown’s blog: The story of how RSS beat Microsoft (ᔥDave Winer, or rather his link blog so I couldn’t figure out a way to link to his actual post made on September 10th, 2025. This was his comment to the link: “We weren’t trying to beat anyone, we just wanted to make a level playing field where bloggers and news orgs could coexist on the web.")
- From the man himself: It’s really simple. Dave Winer’s pre-notes for September 18th, 2025, which will be the 23rd anniversary of the release of RSS 2.0.
A format like RSS has to be loved. And if you make it too complicated or vague, with too much political shuffling of the deck what you get is ActivityPub. That’s what RSS would have become if it went down the path the tech industry wanted to take it down. We have a perfect artifact to look at. An A-B comparison. Couldn’t be more stark. And, after almost 23 years, RSS is still simple.
- Alan Levine: A(I)s We May Not Think (nor search, nor link) (ᔥx28’s new Blog). A riff on Vannevar Bush’s 80-year-old essay As We May Think. Though only mentioned once, the spirit of RSS is strong in this one.
- Buttondown’s blog, again: rssrssrssrss (that is not a typo). Yesterday was the first I’ve heard of Buttondown, which is apparently a newsletter service, but they have a nice blog and do cool things with RSS. This is an open-source service that combines multiple RSS feeds into a single feed. The use cases write themselves.
In the unlikely case you are reading this but aren’t using RSS feed readers, may I suggest a few resources, in no particular order:
- Feedbin (most user-friendly, but you have to pay)
- Feedly (more enterprise-oriented but still good; has a free tier)
- Feedland (Dave Winer’s own creation; unorthodox and completely free)
- NetNewsWire (open-source, iOS/macOS only)
And if I get just one person to stop scrolling down social media walls and start making rivers of news of their own, this Friday won’t have gone to waste.