Build & Defend Newsletter 22

One email a week - something from which I hope you'll get real value. We talk about things we can build, and how to defend them. That can apply to cybersecurity, physical buildings, digital products, and .... just about anything. It gives me a lot of latitude in what I can write about, but the two concepts are important for progress - as individuals, and as society.

(This issue is a little late because Fable is available again!)

Today's topic is: RSS. The old web had a simple superpower: you could choose what you wanted to consume, then read it without begging an algorithm to behave. (In the really early days we didn't even have pictures. And we had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow!)

(That part is kinda true if you attend college in Binghamton, NY, like I did.)

There is a funny thing about the modern internet. We have more information than ever, better search than ever, better AI summarisation than ever, and somehow a lot of people feel less informed. Not uninformed. Less informed. There is a difference!

Uninformed means you do not know what is happening. Less informed means you are constantly being shown things, but the selection is being made by someone else's machine. A machine tuned for attention, reaction, outrage, retention, ad inventory, and platform goals you did not choose. You open an app to check one useful thing. There's the cool post you saw, or the picture you want to show your spouse of the place to which you're going to travel.

Twenty minutes later, you are learning about a political argument you do not care about (or worse, arguing with idiots on the internet, who are dragging you down to their level and beating you with experience), a celebrity scandal you did not ask for, a productivity system you will not use (at least not until you've gone through a hundred and found Sunsama), and an AI take so bad it makes your eyes twitch so bad you look like a semaphore signalling Morse Code.

That is not an information diet.

That is being fed.

This week, I want to talk about one of the least glamorous tools on the internet: RSS. Really Simple Syndication.

Yes, the orange icon from the old blog era. (For many of you, that was before you were born. I'm old, remember.)

Yes, RSS - that thing some people keep declaring dead. (To be fair, they declare it dead less often than bitcoin.)

RSS is boring, open, user controlled, and almost comically unfashionable. (Perfect for those of us in AARP!)

Which is exactly why it is useful again.

Do not overbuild / overcomplicate this. (You can go back to the algorithm if you want complicated.)

The fastest way to ruin RSS is to treat it like a grand knowledge management transformation. Then you spend six hours comparing readers, importing 900 feeds, creating 27 folders, and never reading any of it.

Start small(er).

Use whatever fits your style. Good options include:

The exact tool matters less than the habit.

If you already live on your phone, pick something with a good mobile app. If you read at a desk, pick a clean web or desktop reader. If you like owning your infrastructure, self-host.

Start with:

"Daily" is for sources you genuinely want to scan most days.

Everything else can wait.

The mistake is treating every source as equally important. They are not. Your local weather alert and a 7,000-word essay about the Linux kernel do not belong in the same mental queue. (Or any mental queue? (If Linus Torvalds is reading this, I grant you may be the exception.) (If Linux Torvalds is reading this - thank you - Linux has changed my life for the better in so many ways.))

Begin with a sane number. If it's more than you have fingers and toes, it's probably too many.

A good starter list might include:

You can add more later.

The goal is to build a feed you will use, not a museum of your ambitions.

(There's that word again - value - do you actually value it? Or did you just subscribe because they gave you 5% off your fourth purchase after the full moon?)

Email newsletters are useful, but they can also turn your inbox into a hellmouth. (For those of you too young to get Buffy references, let's just say it's evil and you want to fight it with an ensouled vampire.)

Some newsletters have native RSS feeds. Some publishing platforms expose them quietly. For the rest, tools can convert newsletters into feeds, although you should be selective and careful with anything that touches email.

The principle is simple: Reading belongs in a reader. Work belongs in an inbox.

Mixing them is how you end up with a tax notice buried between seven essays about AI and a discount code for Smartwool Socks. (They are worth the newsletter subscription, though.) Then you don't file your taxes, then you get more nasty emails you miss, then you end up in jail when you're supposed to be having a nice holiday in Cornwall.

RSS lets you follow websites directly. No algorithmic feed. No social graph. No platform deciding that because you paused for two seconds on one dumb post, you must now be deeply interested in that topic forever. No smartphone listening to you and your family discussing hula hoops so that you end up with ads for the world's largest hula hoops. (What ARE they saying with that!?)

Your attention span should is also part of your security model. If someone else controls what you see, in what order, with what emotional framing, and how often, that is power.

Not theoretical power. Practical power.

A website publishes a feed. You subscribe to it in an RSS reader. New posts appear when they are published. That is the whole trick. And the trick is still good.

For a normal person, RSS is a way to follow writers, newsletters, blogs, security advisories, local news, research, podcasts, YouTube channels, product updates, government alerts, and niche sites without checking twenty tabs or surrendering your attention to a social platform.

For a builder, operator, founder, security person, or anyone trying to keep up with a field, RSS becomes something more useful: A personal intelligence system.

Not fancy. Not AI magic. Just a clean pipe of sources you picked.

You can build feeds around categories:

The point is not to read everything. (I may have mentioned that already.)

The point is to remove the middleman, and to guard your attention. (Okay, that's two points.)

And unlike most productivity systems, RSS does not require you to become a different person. You do not need a new personality. You just need a reader, a handful of good sources, and the discipline to unsubscribe from garbage.

(That last part matters.)

A bad RSS setup becomes another inbox. A good one becomes a quiet radar.

Prune Your Reader Every Friday

Once a week, remove sources that are not earning their place.

Unsubscribe if:

This is the part nobody wants to do, and it is the part that makes the system work.

Your RSS reader is not a trophy case.

It is a tool. Keep it sharp....!

Wait, didn't you just tell me not to stack too many feeds?

I don't mean to stack them in terms of quantity, but of quality, and portability

Feeds shape what you believe is urgent. They shape what you think everyone is talking about. They shape what you ignore. They shape whether you spend your morning fixing a real problem or arguing with a stranger who has an anime avatar and a suspiciously strong opinion about which Federal Reserve Chairman was the best (Paul Volcker, in case you're wondering).

The modern feed is optimised to pull you back in.

That does not mean every algorithm is evil. Recommendation systems can be useful. Discovery is useful. Sometimes YouTube really does know what you want better than you do, which is both impressive and also slightly worrisome for the future of humanity.

But there is a defensive posture here: do not make algorithmic feeds your primary source of truth. Use them for discovery. Use them for entertainment. Use them for casual browsing.

Do not let them become your operating system for reality.

RSS helps because it gives you a baseline. You decide the sources. You decide the categories. You decide the cadence. You can read chronologically. You can skim. You can ignore. You can export the list and move it somewhere else. That portability matters.

RSS is not perfect. Plenty of sites hide their feeds. Some publish partial feeds. Some do not support it at all. And yes, RSS readers can become messy. But the model is right. Open beats trapped. Chronological beats manipulative. Portable beats captive. Chosen beats injected.

Sunsama

My Sunsama Affiliate Link

Smartwool

www.smartwool.com

(They don't pay me or anything, I just like their stuff.)

EFF: RSS Is One of the Tools You've Been Looking For

A good recent reminder that RSS still matters if you want more control over what you read.

About Feeds

A simple explanation of RSS for people who are new to it or forgot why it was useful.

OPML

The export/import format that lets you move your feed list between RSS readers.

RSS Advisory Board: RSS Specification

The technical spec, for anyone who wants to see how plain and durable this thing really is.

RSS Readers

Feedly

Inoreader

NetNewsWire

NewsBlur

FreshRSS

Miniflux

Build a tiny RSS feed this week.

Not the perfect one. Not the final one. Not the massive "personal intelligence dashboard" you imagine while avoiding actual work. Just what's recommended in the Build section above.

Then ask yourself a simple question:

Did this make me better informed, or just more burdened?

If it made you more burdened, cut the feed in half. That is the advantage of owning your inputs. You are allowed to make them quieter. The algorithm rarely gives you that option.

Thanks for reading this newsletter! Feel free to respond any time.

Thomas

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