The RSS Reader Comeback
Three years ago, Substack convinced the internet that newsletters were a form of sovereignty. Own your list. Stop building on borrowed land. Don’t let an algorithm decide who sees your work.
The argument was correct. And almost everyone who made it went right back to consuming the feed.
Which is interesting. Because the case for owning your reading is exactly the same argument.
What the platform gives you (and keeps)
When you read inside Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram — or even a curated newsletter aggregator — you’re reading what the platform decided you should read. Not what you chose. What was optimized to keep you in the app long enough to see another ad.
The feed isn’t neutral. It’s a product. And the product is your attention.
RSS is different. An RSS reader is a list of sources you chose, delivering content in the order it was published. No algorithm. No sponsored posts. No “content similar to things you’ve liked.” Just the publications and people you said you want to hear from — unchanged.
You are, in a very literal sense, owning your reading.
The parallel nobody makes
There’s a generation of creators who write about platform dependency with real urgency. “Don’t build your audience on rented land.” “Your Twitter followers are borrowed.” “Own the relationship.”
I agree with all of it. But most of those same people are consuming entirely inside the platforms they’re warning everyone about.
Your reading shapes your thinking. Your thinking shapes your writing. If the inputs are algorithmically curated for engagement, the outputs start to look like that too — optimized for what the platform rewards rather than what’s actually true or useful or interesting.
The creator who only reads what’s trending is eventually going to write like someone who only reads what’s trending.
What a good setup actually looks like
You don’t need many feeds. Fewer than 20 is the target.
The question is the same one you’d ask about your publishing: who specifically do I want to hear from, and why? Not “what topics am I interested in” — that’s how you end up following 300 feeds and never reading any of them. Specific people with specific things to say.
A well-curated reading list is a slow thing to build and a surprisingly powerful asset. The writers you return to every week shape your defaults — what a good argument looks like, what counts as evidence, what the right level of specificity is.
The platform doesn’t want you to have that. It wants you general and reactive.
RSS is how you stay specific and considered.
The same people who publish to their own domain and grow an email list are often letting an algorithm decide what they read.
That’s only half the argument. Make the other half.