How did we forget about RSS?

Syndicating like it’s 1999.

Recently I’ve rediscovered the joys of much-maligned RSS. Tired of social media’s infinite-scroll of clickbait and woe, I looked for better ways of consuming news that I actually want to read - not reliant on a Californian algorithm to decide what I should see.

Being an iPhone user, the first stop was the Apple News app, which has a surprising amount of free content even without coughing up for News+. But in true Apple style remains a closed-market of opted-in content providers. The same is true of several other providers. I was looking to aggregate updates from arbitrary sources - from Ars Technica to the Welsh Target Shooting Federation. Almost like… a news aggregator.

We’ve been here before haven’t we? What is old is new again.

But nobody uses RSS anymore do they?

Happily RSS remains ubiquitous even if few people are consciously using it. Many websites these days are built on some sort of content management system like Wordpress or Joomla! - and those platforms tend to publish an RSS or Atom feed by default, usually without the owner even knowing. It turns out this is how most podcast apps check for new episodes.

By the same token however it can be a bit fiddly to find the feed address. You’re looking for a small wifi-like icon (such as the one in the footer of this page at the end of the copyright notice). If that fails, you’re dipping into the page source and looking for a line including “rss”.

Unfortunately quite a lot of mobile news apps don’t really let you add arbitrary news feeds - even when they’re using RSS under the hood to access their curated providers. Worse yet, all the browser makers have stripped RSS out and I don’t use a messaging client like Thunderbird (which has RSS support) for my email.

There is also the matter of syncing feeds so I can read the news on my laptop, desktop or mobile device. The model of getting your news in your messaging application alonside email has been left behind by mobile devices. I’m also one of those awkward souls who doesn’t really want to give their details over to yet another subscription service, but equally wanted synchronisation. What tangled webs we weave for ourselves.

I’ll host it myself then… with blackjack and hookers!

I found my answer in FreshRSS - a PHP/MySQL application which will run on more or less any cheap shared hosting. One new subdomain later and I was up and running. Installation could not have been simpler - create an empty database; upload the files; browse to the index page and step through the installation wizard. Now I can login from any browser - desktop or mobile - and flick through my unread news easily. Using “Add to Home Screen” on iOS opens my feed in it’s own window, looking almost like a native app.

Alternatives include TinyTinyRSS which is a similar PHP/MySQL app that can be run on basic hosting (which I haven’t tried, but was vaunted as a strong option when Google Reader was closed). If you haven’t got a spare hosting account lying around you could try hosted applications like NewsBlur, The Old Reader or Feedly.

A whole new world

RSS is great. It’s Really Simple and better for it. I love getting news from a dozen sites in a simple list. No ads, popups, sneaky layout tricks or “dark patterns“directing me to specific content - just a list of headlines. Some websites are remarkably generous giving you basically the whole article, others just give you the title/byline and require you to click through to the actual site.

It’s also fast. Loading the feed amounts to ~200kB of resources (your mileage may vary depending on how many feeds you subscribe to). Caching some 700 articles has used… ~1.8MB in the database. By comparison, the BBC News homepage loads some 3MB of resources on it’s own, so it’s a very lightweight application easily run on a shared box.

I’m only using the most basic functionality of FreshRSS, which features plenty of more advanced features such as filtering feeds and running automated search queries.

It also turns out you can subscribe to almost any page on reddit as an RSS feed. This is fantastic - you can follow a subreddit without getting lost down a rabbit-hole of irrelevancies on r/all. All you need to do is stick “.rss” on the end of any reddit url, such as https://www.reddit.com/r/jokes/.rss.

It does feel a bit dirty running a web service to aggregate other web services. There’s certainly something more elegant about having a local application that goes and retrieves your news. But it is easier said than done to synchronise feeds across multiple devices and operating systems. Of course I could use a native reader on each device to subscribe to my FreshRSS feed. At which point it’s turtles all the way down!

I strongly recommend giving RSS a go, whether by self-hosting or from an app. It’s a much more interesting way of spending five minutes than popping open twitter or facebook and is privacy-friendly to boot. If I don’t see a headline of interest, I don’t visit the site. No tracking, no analytics.

Long live RSS!