Every day I struggle to find something to read. Once upon a time, there were feeds, and Google Read was the gold standard: then came paywalls, and feeds suddenly disappeared. Well, they’re still here, but few people use them, because it’s harder to discover and aggregate them.
RSS has a long story, which involves the participation of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide in 2013 after being accused of fraud and other crimes for helping WikiLeaks. At the time, I was a journalist and was very shaken by the incident. Talking about feeds means above all talking about freedom.
That’s why I’m going to provide a series of tools to make RSS great again: I thought I would have to build an auto-discovery extension for Chrome from scratch, but it still exists and it’s maintained by Google. Latest release is from July 4th, 2024, so I think it can be easily installed without potential security issues.
I don’t think that date is just a coincidence. Anyway, Chrome had this feature in omnibox until it was disabled for the same reason that led to the closure of Google Reader—and I want it back. There is also an open issue to make it native that I fear will never be closed.
So, if you install the extension I mentioned, pinning it will help you discover feeds whenever you visit a website that makes use of them. I’m using it with Chrome 139 on macOS and it works as expected: unfortunately, it seems that it doesn’t handle Atom feeds properly.
I tried to subscribe to the DEV Community feed, but I got an error, since it’s Atom-formatted. Visiting its URL directly solves the issue, but I wanted something easier and faster… and that’s not all. Being orphans of Google Reader, we must chose one of the existing alternatives.
Feedly is my favorite choice, but it’s a commercial service which allows only 100 feeds in a maximum of 3 different folders for free: Google Reader was a world apart. That said, you can always add more sources to save your discovering, and I’m thinking about developing a dedicated service.
In the era of generative AI, algorithms will increasingly make decisions for us. Choosing news sources will become increasingly important in order to maintain independence, and feeds are the best tool for this: don’t misunderstand me, I’m enthusiastic about AI, but I do also believe in humans.
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