Why RSS Is So Important Today

RSS is an amazing format for listing news articles, blog posts, podcasts, and pretty much anything else. But with Google News, Snapchat’s news platform, and other news “hubs”, RSS has become more important than ever for preventing the spread of misinformation, discrimination based on opinions, and overreliance on corporate services.

RSS readers provide the basis for decentralization of information received on the internet. If you use an RSS reader, chances are you have multiple feeds from different sites on it. This means that you are not relying on the same service for all your news. The RSS reader you use is hopefully free software; in that case you don’t have to worry about it disrespecting your freedom, so think of it like a mailbox. It takes all the mail you get from these different places and puts it in one place. A mailbox doesn’t say “no” to people with certain opinions. It can’t discriminate, and neither should your news outlet.

RSS readers also happen to be very convenient. Once you copy your favorite feeds' URLs into it, it will list the content of all of them in a hopefully clean and simple way (I know Newsboat for GNU/Linux and spaRSS for Android do). This reason alone is not good enough of course, as the aforementioned points are much more important, but it does help greatly.

RSS is a great platform for many reasons, so if you’re not using it yet, a great place to start would be downloading a free app like spaRSS or Feeder for Android (in F-Droid for Replicant) or Liferea for GNU/Linux. My blog is available on RSS as well under this URL.