The state of RSS in 2021
I’m feeling like a dinosaur or just a weird human being by still using RSS in 2021 in a time of social media dominance but an RSS Feed App is still my most used app every single day, sometimes by a wide margin. But why is it that no one in my close social environment has any idea what RSS is (apart from one friend who I know subscribed to this feed and is probably smiling right now)?
The reason I started to use RSS back in I don’t remember is that I became too lazy to regularly check some websites to find out if something new happened. I think it was by the time I started to work with WordPress where I got in contact with it for the first time.
And even today that is still the biggest reason. I want the news to come to me and not me chasing after them. What can I say, I’m lazy. I have lots of different sites subscribed to, from Apple news to Local news to Hollywood news. I sometimes subscribed to comics (like my daily dose of Garfield). I also subscribed to job offers and I actually found my last two jobs thanks to an RSS subscription. Then there are all the web development articles I get which I hardly read but still, once in a while there’s one I’m interested in.
Other people scroll through their Facebook feed or Instagram feed to see what other people are doing, I’m scrolling through my RSS feed, to each their own.
I remember when Google stopped offering their RSS Sync service and panic broke out, what will happen now. I switched to Feedly for a long time but now thanks to Reeder 5.0 I can use iCloud to sync my subscriptions. When I set up my Gaming and Blender PC, one of the first things I tried to find was a suitable RSS Client for Windows, but I really didn’t find anything that matched what Reeder is offering (feature and look n’ feel wise).
I’m happy it’s still around and I fear the day this nice little feature won’t be around anymore, then I actually have to invest time to check websites on a regular basis?