An RSS Revival?

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.