The Sovereign Feed

RSS is a 1999 standard that still gives readers direct control over their feeds while social platforms route attention through algorithms. The protocol 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 and pull updates on their own schedule, without targeting or an engagement loop in the middle. Facebook and Twitter offered RSS in their early days, then removed it as their distribution models changed. RSS kept running underneath podcasts, read-later apps, and the smaller collection of tools that still treat feeds as user-owned infrastructure.

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 similar properties with newer infrastructure. The protocol was never the missing piece. Readers still need tools that make direct distribution worth choosing.

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