Poke your head into just about any online social network—or any general conversations about internet culture—and you’ll likely find a boogieman: the algorithm. Since at least the moment Facebook introduced (and apologized for) its News Feed, “the algorithm” has been shorthand for the ways tech giants control what we see and when we see it. Good news: there’s a tool that’s been around for decades that can help wrangle many of your feeds into something manageable: Really Simple Syndication, more commonly known as RSS.
What’s RSS and How Do I Use It?
RSS has been around since 1999. It boils down to one general concept: when websites publish new content, like news articles, blog entries, or podcasts, that content gets added to an RSS feed, where your RSS reader (aka newsreader, feed reader, or aggregator) will show you that content in chronological order. If you’ve ever used a podcast player like Apple Podcasts or Spotify to follow different podcasts, you’ve used RSS. Here’s what you need to do:
Find an RSS reader: RSS readers come in many forms. Feedly, NewsBlur, or The Old Reader are web-based, but have their own apps. Others, like NetNewsWire, are app-based. One of the many magic tricks of RSS is that it is platform agnostic, and nearly every RSS reader supports importing and exporting a list of the sites you subscribe to, so you can change readers in a couple of minutes.
Collect your feeds: Adding websites to your feeds is straightforward. Most RSS readers are designed to help find the feed for a site for you. Just drop the URL of what you want to follow into your reader, and if an RSS feed exists, it should find it.
Sort, filter, and build your feed: RSS readers typically include folders, which let you group similar feeds together. Your reader may also have filters, like the option to block any article that contains “sponsored post.”
RSS Is the Best Way to Follow the News
It can be very difficult to follow the news, whether that means politics, tech policy, or your hobbies. RSS can make reading the news much easier, reliable, and more private. The vast majority of news sites have RSS feeds you can subscribe to, and many offer feeds that include the full text of articles, so you aren’t just pummeled with a firehose of news all day long.
RSS Offers One Way to Fix Some Social Feeds
Decentralized social media like Mastodon and Bluesky use RSS for user feeds, so you can follow posts without actually having an account. Some legacy social media works with RSS too, including YouTube and Tumblr. But others, like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, wall off posts behind account requirements.
When in doubt, try copying and pasting the URL for a site into your RSS reader of choice—you might be surprised to find a feed that proves useful to you. RSS is one of the best examples we have of the open web, where we can design and customize how we experience the internet, not the other way around.
This article was originally published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Republished under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0. Read the original article: https://eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/hate-algorithm-rss-one-tools-youve-been-looking.
