@gutvcr replied to your post “i will never stop using rss feeds no matter how many tech articles i...”
ok i have a question. whats an rss feed have been wondering this since the age of 5
answering this as a post bc i’m passionate about it mdfgkhjdfhkg
i’m not good at explaining the technical side of things but basically its a way you can track website updates from a single location that aggregates all the feeds you want to keep track of
i haven’t been keeping up with any of my stuff in a while so ignore the number of unread things lol but heres what the rss feed reader i currently use looks like (lmk if tumblr destroys the image quality to illegibility and i’ll repost as a photo post or something)
each time a feed updates it shows it as unread, its all in chronological order by default and once you click on it remembers that you’ve already looked at that page (or usually a page, even comment services like disqus if you really wanted to keep track of a certain thread of comments each thread has its own rss feed). its also nice in that for many sites you can even see the whole post/article/comment/update/etc inside of the feed in a clean way, i dont personally take advantage of that much and usually just click through but for news sites with lots of spammy ads it can be helpful
personally my main uses for rss feeds are keeping track of new webcomic pages, being able to easily see news articles (for news i obvs don’t read every single article from every single site, but it makes it much easier to see from headlines generally whats happening and then click through to read a few a day when i’m on track, then i can mass mark everything as read), i’ve started using it to keep track of recipe blogs, and also use it to make sure i dont miss when my girlfriend posts on letterboxd. recently i’ve stopped using deviantart because of it being on the BDS from israel list and rss feeds have been nice to be able to see what my friends who still regularly post on there are doing (i can have separate feeds for the art they post vs their favorites vs their journals etc) without giving the site ad revenue or logging on myself
this is a bit of a ridiculous use of them but when i was 11 i literally didn’t even make a tumblr account for a whole year even though i regularly checked tumblr i just had rss feeds of all my favorite blogs and just passively read every single one of their posts and copypasted my favorites in a text document lolol
but yeah!!! a lot of large corporations on the internet seem to have some sort of vendetta against them because they show stuff in chronological order without need for checking sites directly so they cant maximize ad revenue from views or use algorithms to determine what you see and when
even though since switching to an external feed aggregator (i use vienna but i’m sure theres other good ones) i know theres more things you can do with an external program i’m still extremely bitter about even firefox taking away rss bookmark support in-browser earlier this year because i know that will push awareness of them and usage even further down despite how useful they can be. and last i checked one of the only third party add ons for chrome is literally trying to get people to pay a subscription to be able to use rss feeds when they’ve always been freely accessible and i definitely remember at some point there were free rss add ons for chrome even if chrome is one of the few browsers that never had rss support built in iirc. so i’m worried about their future in the face of all that but in the meantime i really think downloading whatever free & open source feed reader app seems good and using it for this type of stuff can be super helpful
oh also i’m not personally familiar with the specifics and its not really relevant to using it as an individual but a significant way rss continues to be used is in distribution of podcasts (something like podcast creators upload episodes to an rss feed and every podcast client can read from that so people can listen on whichever is their preferred platform)
