ルカ-さん Luca-san

A Love Letter to RSS

2 min read

A Love Letter to RSS

RSS represents a relic from a bygone era, a golden age when the Internet thrived as a free and anarchistic space, unregulated and pristine, unpolluted by the disease of bots.

At first glance, subscribing with an email may seem innocuous. Yet, each time we provide our email, we relinquish control and our personal data. Modern Web is engineered around The Algoritm™, optimized for data collection and monetization above all else; a methodology so ubiquitous that we barely notice it anymore. "Subscribe here, enter your email there", and notifications and alerts will follow...but at what cost?

Email subscriptions facilitate tracking, analytics, and monetization. We lose the ability to control our inboxes, and once an email enters these systems, it becomes virtually permanent. Addresses are sold, shared, and even stolen, resulting in unwanted spam and newsletters landing in our inboxes, turning every day into a relentless struggle against unsubscribe buttons1.

Even deleting an email won't free it from the cycle. Countless bytes of data flood the Internet daily, bombarding nonexistent targets merely because an email address once existed. Undeliverable statuses won’t rid those systems of the address in their databases; they’ll stubbornly keep sending, endlessly contributing to the digital noise.

RSS, on the other hand, offers empowerment. It's a pull system rather than a push. You decide which feeds to download; nobody inundates you with unwanted content. You manage all your subscriptions from a single source and determine when to refresh and update those feeds. You can exit at any time, leaving no traces behind in the tangled web of digital noise.

With RSS, there are no analytics, no monetization, and no exploitation. Truly a product of its time, it reflects the values andspirit of a different age when systems were designed to be the best possible, not merely to appease The Algorithm™.

Social media. Modern web. Platformization of the web. The Algoritm™. AI. Major websites have discarded RSS, and major browsers have removed its support2.

Yet, despite all this, RSS persist. A tale of resiliency.

Long live RSS!


1 To be fair, modern spam filters have become quite effective
2 Personally, I've always used Thunderbird as my RSS reader