Own Your Feed
2026/01/21
This is a post imploring you to use a feed reader.
I use Feeder, but you can use whatever you like. Stringer looks neat, as does Miniflux, and Tiny Tiny RSS looks cute.
A feed reader is an elegantly simple way of keeping up with stuff online. Give it a bunch of links to web feeds for your favorite people and organizations and it shows you their latest posts.
Feed readers operate on open standards, meaning there are many to choose from, and you can switch between them at any time by saving a file of your feeds that can be exported and imported. Because it's open, any website can provide a feed, from your favorite record label to your local police department.
Building Your Feed
- Download a feed reader!
- Look for a plus button or menu option to add a new feed (in Feeder, you tap the three dots in the top right, and then "Add feed").
- Find and enter the URL for the feed.
Feeds use XML format, so they'll end in ".xml". If you don't know where to start, copy and paste this ScienceDaily "all" feed link (no affiliation). Right click (or tap and hold) that link, copy it to your clipboard, and paste it into the field.
Feeds can be tricky to find, but they can be lurking in places you don't expect. Look for a WiFi-looking wavy symbol, or try going to the homepage of what you're trying to follow and adding "/feed.xml" or "/feed" to the end of the URL in your browser. Browsers often download the XML file instead of displaying its text to you, which can be a bit confusing.
- (optional) Categorize and tweak settings.
Most applications will then ask you to categorize and configure your feeds. I recommend at least quarantining news to its own category.
Resistance
I envision a world in which my friends' feeds are nestled nicely in their own "Friends" category in my Feeder, and I could check up with them on my phone every once in a while, but I must concede that most people my age prefer Instagram, and getting them off is like pulling teeth.
I believe the biggest hurdles can be overcome with good tools and services that abstract the process of blogging, as well as effective language (the word "blog" might be a hurdle to widespread adoption; it has a bit of a dated context, right?). "Feed" has become a ubiquitous term; it has passed the public taste test. Let's reclaim it to mean what it's intended to mean: a source of links to new stuff on the web. It's stuff you care about, and chose to follow.
Needed Improvements
The most obvious problem is how difficult it is to set up your own web feed.
Right now, to set up a website and feed whose content you truly own and isn't locked into a proprietary ecosystem, you have to:
- Buy a domain from some domain registrar
- Rent a virtual private server from some cloud hosting site
- Use tools like 11ty or Hugo (or stubbornly write your own scripts) to make your HTML files containing your posts
- Set a web server up on your VPS to serve your posts using nginx or similar
- Pay two (small) bills to the registrar and the hosting service (domains are thankfully affordable for now, and usually paid for annually)
That's prohibitive! Doing all that is time-consuming, costly, and requires technical background, but anyone should be able to have their own website. The web has been alive for thirty years! Such a fundamental process shouldn't be so complicated and barrier-ridden.
Platforms like Substack or Medium abstract this process, and at the time of writing, allow you to export all your posts and uploaded content. However, these are companies in the tech sector, and thus are at the whims of their investors. They must make money, and continue to make more money. They retain the capacity, at any time, to censor content they find disagreeable, change any part of the infrastructure that delivers your posts to users, make deals to analyze and sell accumulated data to other firms, and update their terms of service. This makes them unresilient long-term solutions.
Go Forth
Using a feed reader is liberating. There are no likes. You can follow and unfollow anyone at anytime, and it's an open protocol. It can be used for everything from public service announcements to podcasts. Your local library might have a feed for their local events. If an update happens to your feed reader that you don't like, or you want to switch to another, you can export your feeds in OPML and import that file into any other reader.
Compared to social networks, feed readers don't lock you in. They don't intersperse ads between your friends' posts. They can't change the user experience or the terms of use whenever they please. They can't spy on you, analyze you, sell your data, nor train their machine learning models on the duration of every swipe, systematically deducing your habits, interests, and weaknesses. It's a night and day difference that accomplishes the same goal. You keep up to date with your friends, but you don't get abused by a multinational corporation in the process.
That being said, it's not perfect, and ideally the process for subscribing to someone's feed shouldn't be as convoluted as how I documented above. Emails have a "mailto" URI scheme which allows tapping an email address link to automatically open your preferred email client and pre-populate the "to" field. Why can't we have the same for feeds? Megacorporations have demonstrated the effectiveness of removing friction at every corner, and the open web needs to catch up.
Still, just try it!