Over the weekend Wired published a story saying it’s time for an RSS revival and it hit home for me because this year I’ve made a concerted effort to move back to RSS and away from social media.
For my setup, I use Feedbin as the RSS reader and outside of just standard RSS features, it includes several other features that I really enjoy. These include:
- Email Newsletters to RSS
- Subscribe to Twitter feeds
- Support for the new JSON feeds
- Finally, the article share extensions which I use with a combination of Instapaper and Pocket.
Feedbin is commercial and the price is $5 a month and I’m happy that I can pay and support the creators and the developers that work on it.
The one thing I have found lacking with the move back to RSS is finding sources to subscribe too. I did find this PHP RSS OPML list by Freek Murze which helped seed my feed, but so many of my friends stopped blogging and the only way to keep up with them is through social media.
I miss the days when people would have their own site and either write their own thoughts or share resources through link blogging. I’ve tried to work around this by using Nuzzel which collects all the links your friends are sharing on social media and emails you a daily archive. The downside is you lose any commentary on the link, but at least you can see what your friends think is interesting.
I guess at the end of the day I’m feeling nostalgic, but honestly, I’m just tired of the social media hot takes that are meant to outrage. Jason Fried summed it up perfectly:
At the end of the day no matter how much I want it, I don’t see the web ever going back to what it once was. The move from owning your space to being part of someone else’s service is here to stay.
Eric L. Barnes 
Saw the same article and did the same. I went with Newsblur for my first attempt back into it. Hope it can stick, I realised how much I miss getting articles I want to read without cluttering up my inbox or setting up filters
Naturally, this site’s been added 🙂
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Thanks! Added you as well.
Without your comment I probably wouldn’t have found your site and I’d love to come up with some better way for discoveries like this.
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Hey, Eric, what you said is interesting, but I don’t truly get the main point of this post.
Would it be awesome for you, in some way, I understand that it would be great if you could have, in your RSS, your friend’s blogs, twitter and facebook posts.
But. Let assume you can follow people through RSS, and you start following all your friends (where friends = all the people you follow over social networks), then you will see all the anger and anxiety Jason say’s. So, you’re like you started again. Or I didn’t get the point?
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Out of all the years of following blogs and rss I’ve never had the same feeling as in Jason’s tweet.
I think there is something about the medium, short text with no nuance, that drives that style. Where blog posts seem more thought out and more sides considered when writing a diatribe.
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Feedly Notifier allows me to get desktop notifications for a specific folder of my favorite rss feeds. It helps to keep me coming back to my RSS feeds. It’s an open source chrome extension for desktop notifications from Feedly. https://olsh.me/Feedly-Notifier/
I do wish I could get iOS notifications though, although I hear you can get ifttt notifications if you pay for Feedly Pro. I have yet to find an open source rss server with desktop and iOS notifications though, I think that’s what the community really needs.
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