2024-08-04: Where has RSS been all my life?

RSS is back, apparently. Some say it never went away. For today's lucky 10,000, RSS stands for "really simple syndication," and it is a way that websites can publish updates (think blog posts or tweets) which various apps (called "RSS readers" or "aggregators") know how to subscribe to.

The way it works is deliciously simple: publishers post a file on their website that lists all the recent updates in a special format. RSS reader apps check this file for changes every hour or so. Then they present the updates to you, the user, in whatever form you choose — a daily digest, notifications, an email-like inbox — whatever.

The way you subscribe to a website's updates is equally simple: just paste its URL into your reader app.

In this post, I want to talk about a) why RSS is so great, b) how I remained mostly ignorant of it for literally my entire career as a programmer / web denizen, and c) why I think you should forgive its shortcomings and become an RSS user anyway.

Why RSS is great

RSS has some similarities to decentralized social networks like Mastodon, in that no single entity controls the network, and in theory anyone can publish and anyone can subscribe. However, RSS has a crucial difference from Mastodon: whereas Mastodon servers take a lot of money and effort to run, RSS is just a file you put on your website. Literally anyone with a website can create their own, self-hosted, RSS feed, and anyone with an RSS reader can subscribe to it.

Why I missed out on RSS

As great as RSS is, in theory, I think it has some UX shortcomings. In this section, I want to talk about what I think those shortcomings are.

I started programming in 1998, when I was 8 years old. This was a weird time for a kid to become a programmer. The people who created the infrastructure I was building on were of a generation for whom "carbon copies" and "rolodexes" were useful metaphors for stuff computers did. The generation of "digital natives" was not yet born. I was stuck in the middle, trying to wrap my head around the recursive nature of syntax while not really knowing what a "file" was or how to log in to my email account.

(There's an argument to be made that I became a programmer at the best possible time, but that is a topic for a different post.)

In any case, the last 25 years of my life have been spent in slow recovery from the mild but persistent imposter syndrome that resulted from my introduction into this milieu.

RSS was invented one year later, in 1999. Throughout the early 2000s, I saw the RSS icons on websites. You probably saw them too. They looked like this:

I may have even clicked on one of them at some point. If I did, I probably saw something like this: