Web feeds, commonly known as RSS feeds^[1], are a mechanism for subscribing to news sites, blogs, podcasts, social media posts, and really anything else on the web.

Most blogging engines automatically generate a web feed. Most news sites have web feeds. Social media posts on Mastodon have web feeds. The US government has a collection of feeds for everything from congressional bills to court decisions.

You install an app on your phone or computer, pick which feeds you want to subscribe to, and they appear in your own personal timeline.

It's a simple system that has incredible power for putting you back in control of your mental health.

We're used to massive machine learning models curating our feeds for us, deciding what media we consume. And this concept is sold to us under the premise that these feeds are "personalized"--relevant to our interests.

What we often forget is the incentives at play. Companies make money when we engage with their platforms, and so they are incentivized to monopolize our attention by any means necessary. This causes tragic, inflammatory, and polarizing content to bubble up to the top, which affects not just our health as individuals, but the cohesion and strength of our communities.

Shortly after coming out as trans, my news feed was inundated with transphobic content, assaulting me with news of oppressive policy decisions and violence around the country and around the world. This was happening during a vulnerable period in my transition, when I was trying to figure out what my future would look like. And it gave me anxiety about the world I was coming into.

This prompted me to step away from algorithmic news feeds and focus on the news I actually want to consume--the news that isn't detrimental to my health--and web feeds were the solution to that.

Feed readers let you subscribe to the content you want to see. Many let you set up custom feeds aggregating multiple news sources. Some even let you set up keyword filters to block out content you don't want to see or notify you for content you do. There are a number of open-source and proprietary feed readers for desktop and mobile.

Seeing exactly the content you've subscribed to shouldn't be a radical concept. Web feeds are an open standard; anyone can publish them, and anyone can subscribe to them, and corporations can't take that away from you.

1. Technically, RSS is one of several web feed formats, but it's been genericized as a term for web feeds generally. This site has an Atom feed instead, which is a more modern alternative. If you're making a website, you should probably use Atom instead of RSS. ↩