I have seen an explosion of articles about the RSS feeds; each writes about it in their own way. I link to it each time because the blog natively supports RSS, and my reader of choice is Inoreader. There’s also an announcement from Substack too, but more on that in some other post.
A little historical perspective:
Why would I need something else than RSS ? · Garbage Collector
The RSS format, for “RDF (Resource Description Framework) Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication”, has been developed in 1999 and it latest revision, RSS 2.0.11, was released on march 2009. It’s an open format consisting on a XML-structured file that contains website information and a list of articles the RSS reader, or news aggregator, would display. The web server produces the file and update it with the new content, and the news aggregator update its database according to this content and display them in a similar way than email.
How to approach it practically?
Fortunately, some alternative front-ends for social medias have been created (Nitter for Twitter, Invidious for Youtube, etc) and most of them called back this forgotten feature. Mastodon also proposes RSS feeds for the user profiles or hash tags. Today, thanks to these alternative front-ends, I can follow the profiles I want on social media, without giving them my privacy, sorting them into my RSS reader, reading the content when I want, not being polluted by “sponsored” content or “you may also like this content”. The format seems to be regaining some interest because I can see it more and more in various news site. Of course, the various blogs and personal sites propose RSS feeds too.
The linked “instances” are workarounds to avoid the main services, but it is always not feasible. RSS feeds are the best bet. Inoreader doesn’t support Instagram, yet. However, YouTube is natively supported. You can easily follow channels there.
RadOncNotes 