RSS is not dead: reading the web without an algorithm
The technology behind every news app you use is a twenty-five-year-old open standard that never went away. What RSS actually is, why it quietly won, and when it beats a feed.
Every so often someone declares RSS dead. It has been declared dead since 2013, when Google shut down Reader and took most of the mainstream audience with it.
Meanwhile, virtually every newsroom on earth still publishes one. Podcasts are distributed over it. Newsreaders run on it. A great many apps that never say the word are, underneath, reading RSS. The audience left; the plumbing stayed, because nothing better replaced it.
What it actually is
An RSS feed is a file a website publishes at a fixed address, listing what it has recently posted. Headline, summary, link, timestamp, sometimes an image.
That is the whole idea. No login, no API key, no negotiation, no permission. The publisher puts the file up because they want to be read elsewhere, and anyone can fetch it.
Three consequences follow, and they are the reason the format refuses to die:
It is pull, not push. Nothing arrives unless you ask. There is no engagement team on the other end deciding when to interrupt you.
It is chronological by default. The feed lists what was published, in the order it was published. Any reordering is done by the reader you chose, not by the publisher and not by a platform.
It is portable. Your subscriptions are a list of URLs. Export them, import them somewhere else, and you have moved. Nobody can hold your reading list hostage, because it is just text.
Why it lost the mainstream, honestly
RSS did not lose on technical grounds. It lost on two human ones.
Setup cost. A feed reader starts empty. You have to know what you want before it does anything, and most people do not have a list of twelve trusted outlets waiting in their head. Social feeds start full and interesting on day one.
No discovery. RSS only gives you what you asked for. It will never show you the thing you did not know existed, which is precisely what makes social feeds compelling — and, on a bad day, compulsive.
Everything else people say about it — that it is technical, that it is old, that it is for developers — is downstream of those two.
What it is genuinely better at
Completeness. If a source publishes it, you see it. No ranking, no "you might have missed", no post quietly buried because it did not test well in the first ten minutes.
Predictability. The same inputs produce the same output. Tuesday's feed is not different because you lingered on something on Monday.
Privacy. Fetching a public file requires no identity. There is no account, no profile, and nothing for anyone to build a picture of you out of.
Independence. No platform sits between you and the publisher, which means no platform can change the deal.
When an algorithm is the right answer
It is worth being straight about this, because "no algorithm" is a slogan and not always a benefit.
Subscribe to twelve serious newsrooms and you will get somewhere between two hundred and a thousand items a day. On a big news day, all twelve publish the same story, and a strictly chronological reader shows you all twelve, one after another, in a row.
That is not purity. That is a firehose with no valve.
The useful question is not whether to have an algorithm. It is where the algorithm runs and who it answers to:
- On a platform's servers, tied to an identity that follows you everywhere, optimizing for time spent.
- On your own device, tied to nothing, optimizing for what you actually asked to see.
The first is what people are running from. The second is just software doing its job.
How GetMyNews uses it
GetMyNews is an RSS reader that does not look like one, and that is deliberate.
Underneath: 1,200 public feeds across 22 countries, fetched directly from your phone. There is no GetMyNews server in the path — the app talks to publishers the same way any feed reader would, which is why there is no machine of ours that could record what you read.
On top: the parts a raw feed reader leaves to you.
A starting list. You do not begin at zero. The registry is already there, already checked, already sorted by topic and country. By default you get the English-language newsrooms — 359 feeds across 14 countries, including NPR, CNN, BBC News, CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, CNBC and the Los Angeles Times.
Grouping. When several newsrooms cover the same story, they become one card that shows you who else is reporting it. This is the twelve-identical-items problem, solved — and it turns into something better than a fix, because seeing five countries' framing of the same event side by side is genuinely interesting.
Ranking that runs on your phone. The app learns which topics you swipe right on and reorders the deck. That model is a file in the app's own storage. It never leaves the device, and deleting the app deletes it.
A deck with an end. A batch is a fixed number of cards. You reach the last one and you are finished — which is the one thing an infinite feed can never offer.
So: the openness and portability of RSS, without the empty-reader problem and without the firehose.
Should you use a plain feed reader instead?
Honestly, sometimes yes.
If you already know exactly which twenty sources you trust, if you want strict chronology, if you want to read on a laptop with keyboard shortcuts and mark-all-as-read — use a dedicated RSS client. That is what they are for, they are very good at it, and no news app will beat them at their own game.
If you want the openness of RSS but you do not want to build the list yourself, and you would rather read on a phone in short bursts, an app that puts a layer on top is doing useful work.
Either way, the important thing is the same: you are reading from publishers directly, over an open format, with no platform in between deciding what you deserve to see.
Related: why a news app shouldn't need your account, and metered vs hard paywalls for what happens after you tap the link.