Love newsletters? You’re gonna love RSS

I love newsletters. They feel intimate, focused and I love reading them, especially on a weekend like today.

The problem with newsletters is they can clog up your inbox. Your inbox is often a source of stress too. That’s certainly true for me.

There is another option though: RSS. It’s been around forever and a lot of newsletters offer an RSS feed along with the ability to subscribe by email.

I curate The Index — Piccalilli’s newsletter — which is web first. That was really important to me when we set it up — originally as a Set Studio newsletter — because I wanted it to be as accessible as possible to everyone. I’m not one for vendor lock-in.

How can I use RSS feeds?

You’re gonna need to get yourself an RSS reader: a bit of software that takes those feeds and shows you new content to read.

Some free options (that I’m aware of) are Feedly, Newsblur and Inoreader. They’ll be a great entry point for you.

I personally use a paid option — Feedbin — which is quite possibly one of my favourite pieces of software. It’s great because not only can you subscribe to RSS feeds, but you can also subscribe to email newsletters because it gives you an email address that points at your reader. I do this because it helps the publishers. They need those sweet subscriber counts so they can attract sponsors/advertisers to sustain themselves. There’s more info on that stuff here by Stuart.

Feedbin also works well with other apps like NetNewsWire and a nice handful here.

RSS readers aren’t limited to newsletters and blogs either. You can subscribe to a lot of websites — most news publishers offer RSS feeds — and curate your own little digital garden. Defederated social media services like Bluesky and Mastodon provide RSS feeds for profiles too (add /rss to the end of a profile URL on Bluesky and .rss on Mastodon), so again, you can use these to curate your own digital garden.

There’s a lot of doom and gloom, especially now. Try to create a space for you on the web with RSS and I promise, you’ll love it. My advice is go slow and subscribe to stuff you love and when you don’t love it anymore, or the velocity of content from a source gets too much: unsubscribe. I’d stay away from importing someone else’s list of feeds. It’s why I don’t share mine! It’s your digital garden after all.