There used to be a lot of attention and development focused on RSS, a format meant to make it easy for users to subscribe to updates from a site and merge multiple subscriptions into a personal news site. There were all kinds of homepage creators and news readers that ingested RSS, additional formats for sharing your set of subscriptions or even how much you read and how much time you spent on the different sources, and I had worked at one point on a search engine specifically indexing feed content called Feedster. But as the centralized networks like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook gained popularity it was easier for them to just provide a lot of the capabilities that people were looking for. So instead of publishing on their own and using RSS to stitch things together, more and more people just started and stayed on the platforms. Most people describe this as the centralized platforms having “won” over RSS. That’s true from a lot of different angles. But because RSS is an open format it isn’t true from one very important angle. RSS didn’t go away. It’s still available and supported on many platforms. Sometimes even on the platforms that we think of as having run it over.
I’m unhappy with the way YouTube weights what shows up on my main page. I’ve subscribed to lots of channels I actually care about. I might not watch every video they put out, but I do care about what they post. If they post a few videos about things I either happen to not care much about, or maybe I already know a ton about so I don’t want to watch more, the algorithm decides I don’t want to watch them any more. They disappear. Instead I get lots of increasingly crappy videos. Shorts that are just movie clips with odd filters applied and garbage quality videos with clickbait titles and great thumbnails. I do like the serendipity of finding something new sometimes. But my main view should really tilt more toward what I’ve already said I want to watch.
It’s pretty easy to make a version that does exactly that with RSS, and as it turns out RSS is still available on YouTube. They even have the headers on most pages that make it easy to find the RSS feed without having to go digging around for it. So if you want to get the channels you care about from YouTube without allowing them to stop delivering the ones they don’t feel like giving to you - RSS is at least an option.
RSS reading options aren’t as numerous as they once were. But there are some good tools out there. Thunderbird has an option to add feeds into your inbox, and I believe Outlook still has something to handle feeds in a similar way. And when I looked at the App Center on my Ubuntu machine there were a few dedicated desktop feed reader apps that might work well. I wanted a project to play with recently, so instead of just picking up an existing one I made a very minimal command line reader called Feeder. It’s a command line tool that tracks feeds in a minimal SQLite database, and it just writes out an HTML page with the posts to read so I can open it in a normal browser. Works perfect for my use. I’m sure it might be too simple for others. But might be a good match for some so I figured I would share it.