First, You may not be familiar with RSS, so let me give you a short
explanation.
What’s this?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way to share site updates on a
standardized way.
The way it work is very simple.
You have the RSS files, and the RSS clients.
If you want to have one, you first create an RSS file with certain
format (reference) with
the site information you want to share. That file is going to be updated
when some information of the site changes. The most common example is to
give an update when a new article gets added.
You have to host that file on some domain, like https://nperrin.io/rss.xml,
and make sure to update it.
A lot of sites exposes their RSS feeds. So you can have your own RSS
feed list of sites you’re interested. All in one place, and knowing your
subscriptions (as contrast as a e-mail newsletter).
The RSS clients fetch the RSS files that you added (by their url),
every X time. The client checks if they were any updates, if they were,
you’ll get an indication of that, maybe an article was added, then you
could consume that content there.
What’s so cool
All in one place
You don’t have to go to different platforms that track your behaviour
and show you ads. You have all in one place.
Implementation
As a content creator, if you want to notify your subscribers of a
site update, you just have to update this file that you host. It’s very
simple to implement.
Source awareness
Maybe this is something that only happens to me.
Reading through twitter I might encounter a random url of a news,
I’ll read it and go away without knowing if the source was
trustable.
Having a list of news sites to get information lets me get a better
knowledge if the site is trustable or not, as I follow that site through
oher news too.
Although you have browser extensions as News Guard, I think it’s
better to create a small amount of trusted news sites.
You’re in control
As a content creator, you choose what to notify of your site updates.
You won’t get shutdown, de-rank or censored. As long as you’re the owner
of your RSS file…
Spam
When some site asks for your e-mail, my guess is that the site won’t
use that only to send you updates.
They can sell their e-mail list to another company (as people
subscribed to that site have similar interests and can be targeted for a
product).
The site can also received money for publishing ads. If you have
subscribers thought RSS feed, you don’t know the amount of potential
spam receivers you have (I think).
So for users that want to be spam free, this are good news.
What’s not so cool
Discoverability
When you have a fixed list of channels, it’s difficult to discover
new ones, as you only consume the content, you don’t get
recommendations.
The bubble problem is within recommendations too. But I think you
have a better chance of discover new and diverse type of content.
A posible solution would be to proacticaly search for new types of
content when you get interested on something (DuckDuckGo…), and check if that site
you’re checking has recommendations.
Conclusion
There is a lot I don’t know. I just uploaded my rss feed (this are updated as I change the rss
feed) yesterday (28 Jul), so feel free to correct me if you saw
something wrong.
Finally I’ll let some links if you got interested.