A love letter to RSS feeds

September 27th, 2025

Hey look 'ma! I made an RSS feed!

That's right! With the one year anniversary of my aftersleep account (Oct 31st, 2024) crawling ever closer, my little journey through the indie web is starting to become a little bit more settled.

I have been lurking - and posting, though that not as much - for 11 months now, but it's only recently that I bothered to actually start caring about what in the world an "RSS" is. I might write about this on a tutorial someday, but right now I just want to rant because RSS is actually such a cool bit of tech that people just... stopped caring about?

This was basically a way of keeping up with websites and blogs waaaay back when. If you're not going to visit the same website daily to check for new updates, there were two ways: a newsletter sent to your e-mail (which became annoying and slowly clogged up your e-mail) or an RSS/Atom feed.

The newsletter is still used - much to everyone's disappointment - but RSS has been largely forgotten. Now that no one really has their own website but rather just a profile page in the same social media everyone else is in, that social media (and its notifications page) became the way people started getting their updates. People also used RSS feeds for news, which was also replaced by social media or the news source's proprietary app. Really, the only thing RSS feeds are used for these days is keeping up with podcasts, so podcast apps will know where to fetch a given episode from.

However, RSS feeds are still amazing in 2025!

• Sick of algorithms telling you what to watch and read? Want a break from the ads? Don't want to waste time with endless scrollers? Get your news and YouTube videos from only the people you want to hear from! YouTube actually makes one automatically! For example, the Razorback95 Archive/Drenovor's is this!
• Your favourite websites on the indie web are posting cool stuff, and you don't have the time (or the patience) to lurk there every day for updates. The solution? Ask the admin to make an RSS feed to keep you in the know!
• You want to get rid of that pesky newsletter but are still interested in the information it provides? kill-the-newsletter.com automatically turns it into an RSS feed!
• Do you even listen to podcasts? All of them basically need to have a feed, otherwise podcast apps will never find them on their own. Become your own podcast app!
• Want instant updates on something that doesn't provide a feed automatically? A lot of the time you can create your own makeshift one - there are services for this online!

I myself have been using it extensively these past few days! I use it to keep up with the posts of friend (Cammy, Port19, Velipso) and stranger ( sizeOf(cat), Workbench ) alike. I'm starting to use it to replace YouTube, having started to follow the videos of people like SFO, who I admire despite our disagreements, Fr. Casey Cole and Fr. Mike Schmitz, two Catholic priests I have nothing but respect for, Connor Creates and Zach Freedman, both DIY creators I absolutely adore. I am even starting to use it to keep up with old websites that don't get updates anymore.

Really, if you're not using an RSS reader and hunting down them feeds, you are missing out. Again, I made my own so you too can get started! Go get 'em, tiger!

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