The Sovereign Feed

January 2, 2023 2 min read

RSS offers decentralized content control in an algorithm-driven web.

RSS is dead, long live RSS.

A 1999 standard still gives readers direct control over their feeds while social platforms hoard attention behind algorithms. RSS is just XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
    <title>The Sovereign Feed</title>
    <description>Thoughts on decentralized content distribution</description>
    <link>https://example.com/blog</link>
    <lastBuildDate>Mon, 05 Feb 2025 09:30:00 GMT</lastBuildDate>
    
    <item>
        <title>Taking Back Control of Your Content</title>
        <description>In an era of algorithmic feeds and data harvesting, RSS offers a path to content sovereignty...</description>
        <link>https://example.com/blog/content-control</link>
        <pubDate>Mon, 05 Feb 2025 09:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        <guid>https://example.com/blog/content-control</guid>
    </item>
</channel>
</rss>

Readers subscribe to feeds and pull updates on their own schedule. No middleman, no targeting, no engagement loop.

Facebook and Twitter offered RSS in their early days. Both pulled support once the ad model took over.

RSS still runs the parts of the web that need open distribution: podcasts, read-later apps like Pocket and Instapaper, a handful of browsers with native support.

Each feed is decentralized (anyone can publish from any server), standard (the XML is well-documented), portable (subscriptions move between readers), private (no behavior tracking), and direct (publisher to reader, no intermediary).

Arweave, IPFS, Mirror, and Farcaster reach for the same goal with newer infrastructure. The hard part was never the protocol. It's getting readers to pick tools that respect them.

RSS is dead, long live RSS.

Resources

Jekyll Starter Kit - A boilerplate for creating Jekyll sites with RSS support
Adding RSS to Jekyll - Detailed guide for implementing RSS in Jekyll blogs
Gatsby RSS Documentation - Official guide for adding RSS feeds to Gatsby sites
RSS in Next.js - Tutorial for implementing RSS in Next.js applications
Feed NPM Package - Popular Node.js package for generating RSS feeds
RSS on Wikipedia - Comprehensive overview of RSS technology and history