The Slow Feed
7am. I open my feed reader.
No notifications badge. No “new for you”. No “because you interacted with”. Just a number: how many items since I last looked.
I click. I read. Twelve minutes.
No algorithm decided the order. No engagement score filtered what reached me. No platform sat between the author and my morning.
I’ve been starting my mornings this way for fifteen years. I nearly stopped in 2013, when they said RSS was dead.
They were wrong. But not in a way that mattered to the platforms. RSS didn’t die. It just stopped being interesting to anyone trying to monetize attention.
Declared dead, still running
Really Simple Syndication (the full name nobody uses) dates from the late 1990s. The spec has not changed meaningfully since 2002. It’s a text file, publicly available, owned by nobody.
This is unusual. Most web protocols pass through the hands of someone who, at some point, decides what they become next. RSS skipped that step. There was no RSS Inc. with a board wondering how to unlock the enterprise tier.
In 2013, Google killed Google Reader. The tech press wrote the obituary. Feeds? Finished.
NetNewsWire survived. Feedly built a business on the vacancy. FreshRSS exists. Miniflux exists. My reader runs 87 subscriptions on a €9 VPS, uninterrupted, for eleven years.
RSS is not dead. RSS is not exciting. These are the same sentence.
Pull, not push
The difference between RSS and an algorithmic feed is not cosmetic. It is the direction of the request.
When you open LinkedIn or Instagram, the platform pushes content at you. An algorithm (trained on your clicks, your pauses, your scroll speed) decides what appears, in what order, and what quietly never surfaces at all. You asked for content from people you follow. You received content the algorithm believes will maximize your session length.
RSS inverts this. You subscribe to a feed. When you open your reader, your reader goes and fetches the latest entries. The author published; the feed carries it; you pull it. The algorithm is you, and it ran in your head the day you subscribed.
This sounds like a technical detail. It is a political one.
When a platform pushes content at you, the platform decides what you see. When you pull through RSS, you decided before you sat down. The subscription is the commitment. No machine has a vote after that.
The dashboard that doesn’t exist
There is no RSS analytics dashboard.
I mean this literally. When someone reads this post through a feed reader, I have no trace of it. No count of how many readers fetched this entry. No heatmap of how far they scrolled. No open rate, no device breakdown, no cohort to optimize.
Nothing.
On a platform, nothing means failure. Silence is interpreted as underperformance: show this content to fewer people, prompt the author to try again, boost the adjacent paid slot. The algorithm is grading the post in real time and the author feels it.
RSS has no such loop. The post sits in the feed. You read it when you read it. I never know you did.
This is liberating. And I think it is moral.
Moral because it removes a layer of pressure from both ends. I don’t write to satisfy a metrics dashboard. You don’t read while a platform counts the seconds before you swipe away. The contract is simple: I write, you subscribe, you come back when ready.
Slowness is not a bug
RSS is slow in every way that matters to a platform.
It does not viralize. A piece travels the feed world when someone who also has a feed links to it, or mentions it in a newsletter. The mechanism is deliberate re-recommendation, not automated amplification. A great piece can travel far, but slowly, through human hands.
It does not trend. There is no RSS trending page because there is no central RSS server that knows what everyone is reading. Trending requires a panopticon. RSS doesn’t have one.
It does not notify. My reader does not push a badge to my phone when new entries appear. I look at it when I decide to look at it. The author’s publishing pace is completely decoupled from my attention.
Each of these “limitations” is, from another angle, a feature.
No viralization means the content that survives in RSS is the content worth surviving. Trending produces a self-reinforcing spike that evaporates in forty-eight hours; slow distribution produces a long tail of discovery that compounds over years.
No central server means no single point of failure, no API deprecation that kills a thousand clients overnight, no terms-of-service update that retroactively changes what the protocol may do.
No notification means my morning reading is an act I chose, not a reflex triggered by a badge count designed by a team of behavioral engineers.
A moral claim about a text file
I called RSS a moral protocol at the start of this piece. Applied to a data format, “moral” sounds like overreach. Let me be precise.
RSS is not moral because its spec contains ethical clauses. It is moral because the behaviors it enables happen to align with values I think the web should have.
It treats the reader’s attention as something the reader controls. It treats the author as a source, not a content producer rated by engagement coefficient. It treats the subscription as a relationship rather than a data point in a targeting graph. It assumes both sides of the exchange are humans with purposes of their own, not signals to be optimized.
Compare this with the feed of any major platform. The platform’s feed is built on the opposite premise: attention is a resource to harvest. The author’s output is judged by the engagement it generates per impression. The subscriber is a potential conversion to retain inside the session.
I am not arguing RSS will save journalism or restore the public sphere. That is too large a claim for a 2002 text file.
I am arguing that the values embedded in it (pull-not-push, no metrics, no notifications, no owner) are worth defending. And that defending them means using the protocol, not just admiring it from a distance.
The RSS link has been in the footer of this site since launch day. It will stay there.
If you’re reading this in a feed reader: you made a decision before you sat down. That decision, quietly, is everything.
If you’re reading it somewhere else and wondering what the fuss is about: the feed URL is at the bottom. Your reader knows what to do with it.
RSS doesn’t watch. That was never a limitation.
It was the whole idea.
The medium is the message. — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964