Molly White: The Best Way Out of Today's Mess is RSS
The ability of sites to be found on the web has become increasingly difficult with social media platforms penalizing posts that contain links, mountains of AI slop ranking above legitimate sites and Google showing users AI summaries that reword information instead of sending searchers to the originators.
The programmer and writer Molly White says there's a way to read the sites you care about without going through all these malicious middlemen: Start using RSS.
Many, if not most, websites publish an RSS feed. Whereas you can only follow a Twitter user on Twitter or a Substack writer in the Substack app, you can follow any website with an RSS feed in a feed reader. When you open it, all your reading is neatly waiting for you in one place, like a morning newspaper. And RSS is more of a one-way street from a privacy perspective, pushing writing out to you with less of your data flowing back to the publisher.
Fewer websites these days advertise their RSS feeds, and I've seen some people take this to mean they don’t support RSS anymore. They often still do -- you just need to use a feed reader to find the feed, rather than copying-and-pasting an RSS link from your browser. My feed reader has a handy browser extension that glows orange if it detects an RSS feed on the website you're visiting, and lets you quickly add it to your feed reader.
I will note that some tracking is still possible. For example, some platforms will replace links in newsletters with link forwarders that first track the click and then re-route you to the intended destination, and this is something that could feasibly expand to RSS. However, this is somewhat uncommon in my experience -- while you will see this kind of linking a lot in email newsletters sent from practically any platform (Substack, Beehiiv, Buttondown, and Ghost all offer the "feature", and it's often something a writer has to go out of their way to turn off), at least as of writing, these tracking links are typically not present in RSS feeds from those same platforms unless you are using email ingestion.
I've been heavily using RSS for over a decade, and it's a travesty more people aren't familiar with it. ...
RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries. In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.
White offers a tutorial for RSS beginners at the link. One of her best suggestions is to not worry too much about picking an RSS reader. You can easily switch from one to another by exporting your OPML subscription list.
Categories: RSS, RSS Readers, Molly White
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