Happy 25th birthday to the "backbone of my internet", RSS feeds

While I started this post a couple of weeks ago, I learned only yesterday that RSS feeds were created on March 15 (1999), 25 years ago yesterday! So I decided to finish this post today as “my late present” to RSS feeds :). (And because I was too lazy to finish it yesterday^^)

Nota: I’m going to use RSS feeds loosely in the rest of this post to talk about not only RSS feeds but also atom feeds and even to some extent Json feeds and IndieWeb h-feeds (that can be transform into RSS via Granary). Don’t be mad at me if you are a fan of atom feeds and reading RSS feeds for the rest of this page annoys you :).

Introduction

I love RSS feeds! I have been using them for a very long time now… Enough time not to remember when I started, but most probably more than 10 or 15+ years ago… I’ve used many feed readers over the years: Liferea, TT-RSS, LeedRSS, Newsboat, FreshRSS and finally (for now) miniflux, and maybe others I forgot…

Years later, I’m using them even more, not only as a source of content from other blogs and personal sites, but also from private gardens and social media. All my own content is also available via RSS feeds and they serve as the base of my POSSE publishing workflow.

Aren’t RSS feeds dead?

They sure aren’t! Less popular? Maybe, yes! Even though I wouldn’t say it was fully “mainstream” (whatever that means), but it was more widely used during the era of Google Reader. Bryan Braun says it well:

I’ve learned that RSS support is surprisingly good, even today. I think there’s this narrative that RSS usage has been dwindling due to the death of Google Reader and the rise of large social media platforms but I don’t believe it. RSS support is built into platforms like Squarespace, Wordpress, and Substack—tools which are more capable and popular than ever before. […]

…not to mention the entire podcast industry, which is basically built on RSS.

All of this to say, RSS is alive and doing well. There’s no reason that you couldn’t double-down on it too.

– https://www.bryanbraun.com/2023/11/28/doubling-down-on-rss/

RSS are still used a lot by many platforms, including closed / walled garden (eg: youtube, reddit, …) that, even though they don’t advertise it, still provides (more or less hidden) RSS feeds to use outside of their private apps.

Also, I see more and more people talking and asking for them, so maybe that’s a good sign. Most probably because my own “fault” as it is a topic loved by nerds and indieweb (global, not specifically the IndieWeb community) enthousiasts, which tends to be the circle I follow.

I really wish that all websites publishing more or less regularly content would provide an RSS feeds (or equivalent)… If you read this, have a site and don’t provide one, please think about it. You can even reach out to me if you need advise/help! That’s how much I want to it happen :).

As a “consumer”

The obvious use for RSS feeds is for “consuming” or “subscribing” to other sites. But also to discover more content.

Receiving new content from other personal websites

Of course I “follow”¹ many personal websites amongst other things. The list of personal websites in my RSS reader is the base for my blog roll page.

I also follow some aggregators / planets, but there are very few of them still alive. Planet EmacsLife and Planet Drupal comes to mind with others, but I wish we had more. The web used to be filled with these type of sites but most are now gone…

Some software team also have blogs with RSS feeds that I follow (eg: sourcehut, forgejo, Qutebrower, Wallabag.it, …) or even games websites (I really enjoy Factorio Friday Facts for example).

“Subscribing” to closed gardens

News website

I try to limit those, because they have a tendency of spamming my RSS reader… But I do have a 2 of them (paid subscriptions), some IT/Tech news feeds, and a few sports related feeds. As they usually are too noisy, they are hidden from the global feed (see the detailed section at the end of this post).

Youtube

I also use my RSS reader to subscribe to some Youtube channels. Youtube indeed provides RSS feeds for channels, which is great if you don’t have a Google account or if you don’t want to use an app or their site to stay up to date of your preferred channel.

If you have a channel ID, all you need to do is add the following address in your RSS reader (replace <ChannelID> of course):

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<ChannelID>

I don’t follow many youtube channels (less than 5 I think), but it is still very handy. Youtube RSS broke a few weeks ago for a few hours and I was very scared that they might have pulled the plug on RSS… But that was not the case (at least yet), so we can still enjoy those feeds without Google accounts :).

Github (and other forges)

Github provides RSS feeds for projects releases, by adding .atom at the end of the URL.

For example, my GTL project releases page is:

https://github.com/bacardi55/gtl/releases

And the feed is available at the .atom URL:

https://github.com/bacardi55/gtl/releases.atom

This is very handy to stay up to date for the tools I selfhost. Other forges like forgejo or sourcehut also provide this as well. I don’t use these feeds anymore since I use willow to stay on top of software releases.

Reddit

Same as github and youtube, you can play with the URL of a subreddit to get an RSS feed by adding .rss at the end of the subreddit URL. For example for the homelab subreddit, the URL is:

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/

And for the feed URL:

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/.rss

And now I can follow some subreddits without subscribing with a reddit user.

Also, because I did create a very long time ago a reddit user, it is good to know that reddit will generate a feed with all your subreddit subscriptions, which is cool to have a unique feed for everything reddit related (but the more subreddit you follow, the more noisy it gets).

Discovering new links

I also use RSS feeds to find new articles or new sites I may find interesting. For that, I’m following some planet type site, some website clubs or bookmarks / links feeds from blogs. Below are some example, not an exhaustive list at all:

Website Clubs

Some website clubs provides RSS feeds for the newly added sites to their directory:

• A list of recently added sites from the Ooh Directory
• 250KB Club have an new website feed
• 512KB Club also have an RSS feed for new sites
• 1MB Club RSS Feed

Recently, I also subscribed to the list of new sites on the searchmysite search engine (because the number of site added is very low^^).

Planet / Aggregator type site

Some aggregators example:

• Closer the the IndieWeb, IndieSeek provides a manually curated lists of posts from and about the IndieWeb
• Still in the indieweb world, the indieweb news has an English feed and French feed (via granary) for article published to indieweb news
• The indieblog.page provides RSS feeds for receiving 5 random posts per day.
• The blogroll.org website has a planet as well. I don’t subscribe to it because there are too many posts per day on it for me.

Bookmarks / Links feeds

Here are some websites sharing links / bookmarks, like my Bookmarks page:

• ShellSharks note feed
• drhayes links feed
• Jamie Tanna bookmarks feed
• grgml bookmarks feed
• Lars Christian links feed
• Chris McLeod bookmaks feed

As an “producer”

RSS feeds are both a format in which my content is (fully) available in, and a way to manage my POSSE² workflow.

While I do prefer RSS feeds to contain the full content of articles, I can accept if that’s not the case. In many cases, if I don’t have time to read an article right now but still find it interesting, I send it to my wallabag for later read. Wallabag usually does a good job retrieving the content only from the web page without me going there. If all that doesn’t work and I must go to your site to read it, so be it (except if your site is bloated in JS and tracking or other crappy stuff - but if that’s the case, I most probably did not add your feed to my reader :D).

On this site

As written in the about page, there are 5 (for now at least) RSS feeds available on this website:

• All feed: Contains all posts: Blog, Gemlog, bookmarks and pages
• Blog feed for blog posts
• Gemlog feed for Gemlog entries
• Bookmarks feed for Bookmarks
• Pages feed for pages

As said above, the full content is available in the feed. Well, that’s not true for gemlog. The reason is the same as for why my gemlog entries are not readable on this website: if people want to read my gemini only content, they must either read it via a gemini browser or find a web proxy themselves :).

At the center of my POSSE workflow

Thanks to RSS feeds and the simple yet powerful feed2fedi, I can use the previously mentioned RSS feeds from this site as a way to share blog posts / gemlogs / links on other systems, in this case the Fediverse via my selfhosted GoToSocial instance. Of course, the fact that I’m only on the Fediverse, an open and decentralized social network, and not on private golden jail (X, Facebook, Instagram, …), helps a lot my POSSE workflow as it means syndicating to only one place. But still this is done via this site RSS feeds that feeds my blog, gemlog and links Fediverse BOTs.

I’m also planing to add a new notes section, containing short posts that will be posted directly on my main Fediverse account. The idea behind notes would be to move some of my Fediverse post to my sites (only the one I think are worse saving). I indeed consider the Fediverse like ephemeral web (as tantek defines it) even if I selfhost the instance, as opposed to this website that I consider more like permanent web. But then again the syndication will happen thanks of the beautiful RSS technology.

For my social media

GoToSocial, as Mastodon, provides an optional RSS feeds for accounts. My main account has such a public feed for people that wish to follow my nonsense there via an RSS reader. My bots do provides RSS feeds too… But that’s going back full circle are they are actually based on the RSS feeds from this blog… So I wouldn’t suggest to use them… But there are available anyway :).

Bonus: Some details about my RSS reader setup

I’m not going to share my entire OPML list (but one day I may add an OPML file for the more / blogroll page), but here are the different categories I have in my RSS reader. The category marked with (*) are not displayed in the global view, meaning I need to enter their category to see feeds items from them. This is because most of the feeds in those categories are either “noisy” (too many new entries per day) or less important and I want to check them in bulk quickly. I usually want to look at them once a day or less, while I look (a lot) more often at the others.

• Bloggers: All personal websites in English
• Bloggers FR: Personal websites in French
• Bloggers IndieWeb: Bloggers from the IndieWeb community, meaning that they accept webmentions
• Dev: Development related feeds
• Drupal: Drupal related feeds (eg: planet Drupal) or bloggers linked to the Drupal world (eg: Dries)
• Discovery(*): Contains bookmarks / links / club / search feeds
• Emacs: Emacs specific blogs (and planet-emacs)
• fun(*): Some web comics I’m following, like the famous xkcd
• Geek News(*): Some general IT related feeds
• Gnu/Linux(*): News releated to gnu/linux (eg: archlinux updates or the planet debian)
• Hip Hop(*): Some hip hop related youtube channel RSS feeds
• Me, Myself and I(*): The 5(!!) RSS feeds from my blogs, mainly to test and my personal feeds from webmentions.io (containing new webmentions)
• News(*): Local newspaper I’m paying for
• Reddit(*): Some subreddit RSS feeds
• Software Updates(*): News about software vendors (eg: sourcehut, wallabag.it)
• Sport(*): RSS feeds about some specific sports / teams
• Youtube(*): Other non musical youtube channel

I’m following a total of 195 feeds. It is definitely a lot. I don’t know how many new articles are available every day (would be interesting to have some stats there), but I don’t read them all. Some I ignore (mark as read) because I’m not interested in a specific topic (and that’s ok! No need to go full FOMO³, read what you want). I also look at some of the (*) categories only once or twice a day at most (eg: news), sometimes more 3/4 times a week (eg: reddit, sports or IT news).

Conclusion

What can I say here as a conclusion? That I love RSS feeds (and other equivalent open standards)? That this piece of “old” (in web terms) technology has been, is and probably will be at the core of my internet usage for many years and more?

Sure, all are true, but maybe my real conclusion is: I’m not sure what my web browsing experience would be without RSS… Most probably a lot more time wasted opening bookmaks after bookmarks looking for new content… I can’t imagine… Please keep RSS feeds alive!