RSS is Freedom Tech

You know stress is a killer? Stress, as a rare and sudden jolt that helps you avoid a terrible fate can actually be a lifesaver. But sustained high levels of stress slowly sabotage your body.

I don't know about you but the news give me anxiety. Fear captures attention and your attention can be sold to the highest bidder. This is true, now, on YouTube or online publications but it was true for the tv, the radio and newspapers. So, fear is a great tool for publishers. Social media also bums me out. I've deleted accounts. But I don't want to feel disconnected. I still want to keep myself up-to-date on what I care about.

So, I use RSS. And, in this post I'll tell you how you can do it too. I am going to discuss the software I use, and the approach I take to maintaining my feeds.

When you're done reading this my goal is for you to realize there is an alternative and to opt out of the convenient river of bad news that clouds your days.

A lot of websites use RSS to inform their audience of changes. It can usually be found at https://www.example.com/feed/ or https://www.example.com/rss. RSS has been around for years and - despite flagging enthusiasm - it hasn't died yet. I suspect that it is useful enough for machine-to-machine processing that the protocol is kept and maintained.

RSS is really just a standard way of laying out information for updates. There are a few universally supported formats. You don't really need to know much beyond this. What you need is a RSS-formatted file that is hosted online. Hence it is most often manipulated as a URL. In other words, it's just a link.

By the way, podcasts are RSS. When you subscribe to a podcast, you tell your podcast app to go fetch any new episode (article) according to the feed URL. Corporations have built their proprietary solutions on top of open source RSS.

In order to create a delightful world of personal news that don't make you angry or disrupt your hormones, we are going to need at least a server and a client. The server will run constantly, subscribe to the feeds you have specfiied and check all these feeds on a regular basis. When you open it, your client will ask the server "what are the latest articles?" and receive the newness.

I have been using a combination of FreshRSS as the server and Reeder (now Reeder Classic) as the client for years. It is very reliable, very fast, and you quickly forget that you're running this at home, not paying professionals to provide such a stellar service. And it is rather straightforward to install or run FreshRSS in a Docker container. But, you could also use Miniflux as the server, I've read it's really good too.

A note on security: I wouldn't expose my RSS server to the public internet. Instead, I would either have my client connect to the server only on my home network. Or I would make use of Tailscale to have my machines talk to each other on a dedicated VPN.

Don't let these last two paragraphs challenge your resolve. Peace of mind and intellectual emancipation is only a few LLM chats away.

So let's take a concrete example. Say, you just learned about a crazy new image rendering technique that uses Gaussian blobs and unlocks new levels of efficiency and you want to keep abreast of what is going to happen next. One way to do so could be to go to alerts.google.com, create a new search for "2d gaussians image" and select delivery via RSS.

You click Create Alert, then copy the RSS link and add it to your client. Your client instructs your server that this feed should be subscribed to and checked regularly.

Sometimes, you might have to hunt a little bit for the feed you need. Not all websites provide one but you can find workarounds. For example, I found a way to convert newsletters into RSS feeds with a Google Script. Or changedetection can produce RSS for website changes.

Now, please bear in mind that RSS subscriptions, like many free delicious things, can grow out of control. You might end up with so many new articles to consume that it becomes overwhelming or noisy. That's when it's time to prune. If you have hundreds of unread articles, find the larger feeds and consider a couple of approaches:

• Filtering: The way that this works on FreshRSS, you will specify keywords that cause an article to be marked as read automatically. This way it doesn't show in your client when you pull unread articles.
• Narrowing the scope of your search: this is most relevant to Google Alerts. Instead of subscribing to alerts for "dog" try instead "dog that walk on their anterior legs" or "dog -cat -husky -bernadoodle -yorkshire"

With a setup like this, it becomes very easy to nourish your mind with ideas you care about, concepts that make you grow, content that inspires you. And, it runs on your own infrastructure. And, you can unplug from a non-stop stream of depressing or enraging news about situations you have little to no control about.

Regain control over your mental diet.