The Internet Has Turned Into a Desert, So Let's Use RSS

Feeds#

A website publishes a special file (an RSS feed) that describes information like the titles, summaries, and update times of its latest articles in XML, a format that’s easy for machines to read. This is the site’s “broadcast signal.”

Readers#

Users run an application or web service (an RSS reader) to receive these “signals.” Once you register the feed URL of a site you want to follow, the reader checks the feed periodically and, whenever there’s an update, shows the new articles in a chronological list.

So to get started with RSS, all you have to do is pick a reader and gather the feeds you want to subscribe to.

…Come to think of it, this is exactly the good old Twitter, where users could freely customize both the client and the timeline.

Bonus: A Brief History of RSS#

Just for the record, here’s a short history of RSS.

RSS traces back to 1999, to development at Netscape. After a period of confusion in which multiple versions sprang up everywhere, RSS spread alongside the explosive rise of blog culture. Blogs, where individuals freely publish information, and RSS, which lets you efficiently subscribe to their updates, worked as the connective tissue of a decentralized web with no central administrator.

What brought RSS to ordinary users was Google’s web service “Google Reader,” which appeared in 2005. Easy to use right in the browser, it became the central hub for how internet users gathered information at the time.

But on July 1, 2013, Google announced that it was shutting down Google Reader. The official reason was declining usage, but not many people believe that.

If your web surfing is fully self-contained inside RSS, there’s no room to slip ads in. For Google, spreading RSS was suicide. On top of that, Google was pouring its energy into its own social network, “Google+,” at the time. It’s quite likely they wanted to steer users over there.

The absence of Google Reader, the overwhelming market leader, opened a huge hole in the RSS ecosystem. Users scattered across countless alternative services, and most of them couldn’t offer anything close to Google Reader’s convenience.

That new “inconvenience” in RSS, combined with the algorithm-driven “comfortable” feed experience offered by Twitter and Facebook, which were growing rapidly at the same time, sealed the shift of both users and publishers away from the open, decentralized world of RSS and into the closed, centralized silos of social media.

And every one of those social networks has since rotted. Not just the companies running them, but even the users have turned into nothing more than things that endlessly pour out ads. That’s the current disaster, and I get the feeling that a movement to revive RSS is starting to emerge from here… maybe.

Noise Reduction#

As I wrote at the top, the internet these days is just way too noisy.

For example, say you’re wondering “who’s going to win the leadership election?” (the race to lead Japan’s ruling party) and you open the following Yahoo News article.

You get a screen like this (this is with an ad blocker on. Without one, I imagine it’s much worse).

The information I actually wanted takes up only about half the screen.

The especially nasty ones are the “time thieves.” Links trying to lure you to other articles, and if you scroll to the bottom of the page, the infamous comment section is waiting for you. Once you get caught up in these measures to boost how many pages you click through, it’s very hard to escape. You usually end up at some celebrity scandal about someone you don’t know, or a rage-bait article, and you walk away feeling awful.

With an RSS reader, though, you can read the same article like this (since the feed itself doesn’t contain the full text, this is after using “Load full content (hotkey W)”).

I, at least, vastly prefer this.

With RSS, you can cut off the paths to information you didn’t ask for and receive only the essential content.

Read in Your Favorite Format#

I think everyone has a favorite format (font, background, and so on) for reading text. And most sites are never set up the way you like.

For example, I don’t like the look of note (a Japanese blogging platform). The lack of a dark mode alone is unforgivable, but I hate everything about it, from the narrow width to the line spacing.

Even then, with RSS, you can read in the look you like (depending on the reader).

Read Everything in One Place#

This is RSS’s original function, but being able to get the latest information from every source in one place is incredibly convenient.

Everyone surely has sites they visit more or less daily or regularly, and topics whose latest news they want to keep up with.

In my case, frameworks and services around AI are updated at a terrifying frequency, so checking their release notes was a daily chore. A textbook use case for RSS.

Once you’ve registered the feeds, you can search across multiple sources for a given topic all at once like this. This is insanely convenient.

With RSS, you can follow the latest information without wasting any effort.

High Portability#

As long as you carry around the list of feed URLs you subscribe to, you can use pretty much any reader in pretty much the same way.

Syncing across multiple devices, like a PC and a phone, is easy, and you’re free from the vendor lock-in situation where you can’t switch because your settings won’t carry over (of course, that doesn’t apply if you use reader-specific features).

You can switch RSS readers freely.

Pick a Reader#

First, you need to pick a reader. I had Professor Gemini (the AI) put together a list of the representative ones.

(There must be countless others. Look around as needed.)

I wanted to use it together with the Zen browser, so my options were narrowed down to Feedly and Inoreader, which can be used on the web. I tried both, found Inoreader considerably easier to use, and that’s what I’m using now.

Inoreader’s free plan restricts some features. But what’s restricted is almost entirely Inoreader’s own features built on top of RSS, and there’s hardly anything that damages the pure RSS experience. The one exception is the cap of 150 subscribed feeds, which is a paywall that gets in the way of RSS itself, but with 150 slots, that should cover most people’s use cases.

Inoreader – Build your own newsfeed

With Inoreader, content comes to you the minute it's available. Follow websites, social media feeds, podcasts, blogs, and newsletters. Enjoy what's important to you, all in one place.

www.inoreader.com

Switching from Chrome to Zen Browser Radically Changed My Web Surfing

Subscribe to Feeds#

After that, you just keep adding the feeds you’re curious about to your reader. The trick is to subscribe to everything for now and sort it out later.

Some feeds only give you the opening of an article instead of the full text. Readers also have a “read full text” feature, but with some feeds it doesn’t work well.

Tinkering with those things as you go along should be part of the fun.

Weathernews#

A must. You get high-quality weather information. Weathernews puts the full article text inside the feed, so you can read articles with zero stress.

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http://weathernews.jp/ch/gunosy/article.rss

NHK News#

You can’t do without a news site. The “read full text” feature works well with it, so I subscribe to NHK News (Japan’s public broadcaster).

The one below is the “Top Stories” category, with everything mixed together, but there are also feeds by category, so subscribing to those might be better if you’re interested in a particular topic.

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https://www3.nhk.or.jp/rss/news/cat0.xml

Events Near Where You Live#

No matter where you live, there’s always a site that rounds up upcoming events.

For Tokyo, for example, there’s the following.

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https://www.tokyofes.info/feed/

If you subscribe, it’ll tell you good spots to go out to on the weekend. Recommended for physical and mental health.

Roll the Chance Gacha: Go Outside on Weekends

Hatena Bookmark: Popular Entries#

The so-called “hot entries” (hottentori). Feeds by category might be better here too.

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https://b.hatena.ne.jp/hotentry.rss

Trending Tech Blog Articles#

Hot entries from Zenn and Qiita (Japanese developer article sites). Very useful for keeping up with what’s trending in IT.

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https://zenn.dev/feed

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https://qiita.com/popular-items/feed.atom

Daily Portal Z#

Personally, I love it. The “read full text” feature doesn’t work well, but with DPZ (Daily Portal Z, a Japanese humor and lifestyle site), I want to read it properly on the site anyway, so that’s fine.

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https://portal.nifty.com/rss/headline.rdf

Genshin Feed#

The internet is a wonderful thing. Genshin Impact has no official RSS feed, but volunteers run one.

You can choose by language and category from the following.

Genshin Feed: Genshin Impact RSS feeds from official Genshin Impact news!

Do you want Genshin Impact RSS feeds? Genshin Feed builds every hour RSS and Atom feeds of official Genshin Impact news and announcements!

genshin-feed.com

I subscribe to the Japanese “All articles” feed.

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https://genshin-feed.com/feed/rss-ja-all-articles.xml

Any YouTube Channel#

Depending on your reader, you can also subscribe to YouTube channels as RSS feeds.

Of course YouTube itself has a Subscribe feature, but (as far as I know) you can’t organize channels into folders or anything, and when you go to check for new videos you can end up falling into an endless Shorts hell, so I want to avoid going to YouTube itself as much as possible. Using this method is overwhelmingly more convenient.

I personally want to watch every video from this person, so I’m subscribed.

Technology Connections

www.youtube.com

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https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCy0tKL1T7wFoYcxCe0xjN6Q

Release Notes for Any GitHub Repository#

You can even subscribe to GitHub release notes. If you subscribe to the frameworks and so on that you use every day, you’ll catch the latest updates instantly, which is super handy.

The following is the release notes for Mizuki, the theme this blog borrows.

GitHub - matsuzaka-yuki/Mizuki: Next-Gen Material Design 3 Blog Theme (Astro Powered)

Next-Gen Material Design 3 Blog Theme (Astro Powered) - matsuzaka-yuki/Mizuki

github.com

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https://github.com/matsuzaka-yuki/Mizuki/releases.atom

ilapaj Library#

This blog.

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https://ilapaj.com/rss.xml

1. Look for Text or Icons on the Site#

On old-school websites, this orange icon marks the link to the RSS feed. It’s often tucked away quietly in the site’s footer or sidebar. Sometimes it’s just the text RSS. Click it and you should get either a page explaining how to subscribe or the raw data of the RSS feed. In the former case, follow the instructions; in the latter, just copy the URL from the address bar.

2. Use a Browser Extension#

This is where you install a browser extension for finding RSS feeds.

With one of these extensions installed, if the site you’re viewing offers an RSS feed, an icon appears in the address bar or similar. Just by clicking it, you can grab the feed URL or register it directly in your reader.

3. Use Your RSS Reader’s Search Function#

Full-featured readers like Inoreader and Feedly can find feeds automatically when you search by site name, keyword, or URL.

In most cases, you just paste the URL of the site you want to subscribe to and the reader figures out the feed for you, so this is the first thing to try.

Incidentally, I use Inoreader because I liked it better than Feedly in various ways, but when it comes to searching for feeds, I felt Feedly was better.

So a hybrid approach might be handy: find good feeds with Feedly and register them in Inoreader.

4. Guess the URL#

As a last resort, you can try appending certain strings to the end of the site’s URL.

• https://example.com/feed
• https://example.com/rss
• https://example.com/rss.xml
• https://example.com/atom.xml

Blogs built on WordPress in particular (about 40% of all sites in the world are) can often give you a feed just by adding /feed to the end of the domain.

5. Use External Tools#

I haven’t used it myself yet, but it seems that on Feedly’s and Inoreader’s paid plans, there’s a feature that forcibly generates an RSS feed even for sites that don’t provide one.

There also seem to be external tools that turn email newsletters into RSS feeds or Twitter accounts into feeds.

I haven’t tried it yet, but the one that especially catches my eye is the following.

RSSHub

Everything is RSSible 🧡

docs.rsshub.app

Everything is RSSible

It’s an open-source project with that slogan, and it can “generate” RSS feeds from social networks that don’t officially provide them (Twitter/X, Instagram, and so on), news sites, and many other services.

List of Major RSS Feeds in Japan#