Wow, it feels like so long since the last one of these lil guys. I suppose that’s what doing 5 less newsletters a week will do to you. Anyways, on with the show!

RSS Feeds are really cool guys

I think it’s pretty fair to say that the way the internet is going right now is… like not great. A handful of tech monopolies control so much of what happens on the internet. I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I don’t think that’s working out great. Personally, I used TikTok for one summer back in 2020 and it made me absolutely miserable. It was just a time and attention vortex of people I didn’t know and things I didn’t care about. And… you know. So many things to be stressed and anxious about. But also… summer of 2020 moment :/.

I experience—I don’t know if we have a word for it in English—but a nostalgia for a time I wasn’t around for. Basically, I think that the way that the internet nowadays preys on attention and anxiety serves only to enrich shareholders and degrade the quality of life of these services’ users. Now, I don’t want to imply that I am above being caught in this attention vortex. I’m certainly a screenager in many ways I wish I weren’t. But there is a way to engage in the internet that avoids a lot of this: RSS Feeds.

RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication. I’ll spare you the history lesson, but basically RSS Feeds provide an internet-wide method for sharing updates from a website with interested readers/watchers/listeners. It’s the exact same technology that podcasts use!

There’s a couple really swanky things I like about RSS Feeds:

• There’s No Algorithm. It’s just the stuff you have decided you like and are interested in having delivered to you. It’s an experience curated for you by you, and no one is benefiting from keeping you glued to your RSS reader for hours on end.

• It’s Not Owned By a Company. There isn’t a big RSS company. Literally anyone could set up an RSS feed. There isn’t a Meta looming in the background trying to profit from you. And a big corporation can’t decide “actually, having RSS feeds about gay people isn’t politically popular anymore, so we’re going to shut those down.”

• Not About Advertisers. Your RSS feed doesn’t have to be populated by random ads that some massive company is profiting off of. Sure, some of the blogs or sites you’re following may have ads in their pieces. But they’ll typically be more about things you care about. For example, Thomas Manuel’s Indie RPG Newsletter had a small ad in today’s issue for The Wildsea (which you may remember from the previous issue of the Nightly Buzz).

• Across the Internet. RSS Feeds are everywhere, meaning your RSS Reader can pull information from across the internet into one place. For instance, my RSS Reader has a bunch of blogs, some YouTube channels, one subreddit (not r/ubc), a couple BlueSky accounts, one Mastodon account (see Other News), my high school English teacher’s poetry, and a handful of newspapers (Ubyssey my beloved).

I really think that you should try out RSS readers. I’d argue they are a healthier way to engage with the internet. And it’s actually really easy to get started.

1. Choose an RSS Reader. This can frankly be a pretty arbitrary decision to start. I’d look for an open source one that doesn’t put ads of its own in your feed. But ultimately, any RSS Reader worth its salt will allow you to export any feeds you’ve added, so it’s really easy to swap.

2. Add Some Feeds. Choose some things you care about and add them to your reader of choice. I started with TTRPG blogs and newspapers, but you can start with whatever. Some sites will have an RSS feed easily available, which you can identify from the RSS symbol, or something like it. If you can’t find a feed, give your friendly neighbourhood search engine a query or go to openrss.org who does some great work making RSS feeds.

   

   The RSS Feed symbol

3. Profit. Read things in your RSS Reader. Add more things to your RSS Reader. Feel like you’re sticking it to the man a little bit :D.

Anyways, that’s my RSS feed rant. I think you should try it! They’re kinda a great technology, and I wish they’d be more popular. Also I think all of you nerds should start blogs. We could have a little blog community!

Finally, I have something terrible to admit. Which is that Beehiiv (the service I use to send these newsletters out that I chose principally because it was bee themed and The Ubyssey was using them) only offers RSS feeds for newsletters like these for premium users. Which… I’m not planning on becoming in the nearby future. At some point when I have time I’ll look at what it’ll take to get an RSS feed set up for these babies, but probably not for the next couple weeks :D.

Other News

“Sam Low fix your quiz”

In a previous email, I took The Ubyssey’s AMS Executive Personality Quiz. This quiz (erroneously) told me that my AMS Executive Personality was VP Finance. In response to this, I wrote “I’m gonna be honest… VP Finance is the worst VP position. And I think I’d be very bad at it. Sam Low fix your quiz.” Well, well, well. Someone is on this newsletter with three different emails and look what turned up in ubyssey.ca GitHub…

(I’m sorry I saw this 8 days after it happened, Sam. I don’t check The Ubyssey GitHub every day. Plus it’s then like 4 days from when I noticed to when this Newsletter comes out. So it’s a whole thing)

Also we got a mention on Sam Low’s Mastodon

The Ubyssey purges the Nazi site

While I was on The Ubyssey GitHub (as normal people do), I saw that they removed all of their links to the social media site owned by Elon Musk—a man who talks like a Nazi, acts like a Nazi, and salutes like a Nazi. Which, in my book, makes you pretty close to a Nazi.

Anyways, take a cool at The Ubyssey’s post about our opinion article they made on BlueSky.

And also, Sam Low says nice things about us on Mastodon (your microblogs are in my RSS Reader now, buddy)

From the Web

• When teenagers run virtual democracies. For some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, this video caught my eye. You know what’s wild? These teenagers are making decisions regarding sexualized violence/CP! That’s so wild and funny. Unrelated to anything else.

• “Ma Meilleure Ennemie” [Official Music Video]. Timebomb shippers rejoice. Every Arcane ship gets one (1) smile, and this is y’all’s.

• For-Profit (Creative) Software. Somewhat risky to share an essay I haven’t finished, but this one is kinda great—especially for what seems to be the author’s first public video essay. It’s about the history of 3D software, corporate consolidation, and enshittification. And the author uses animated scenes to tie together parts of the essay. I’m enjoying what I’ve seen of it so far.

• Red Hats, Red Blood: Roleplaying The January 6 Insurrection In A Brooklyn Warehouse. This is from a couple weeks ago, but this piece from Rascal absolutely blew my mind when I read it. It’s a war-game about the January 6 Insurrection. This piece made me cry.

From the Archive

Sometimes you look at something made over 40 years ago, and it just feels so close to home. Honestly, this whole February 12, 1982 issue hit so hard.

That’s All!

That’s tonight’s newsletter! I had been writing something else for the main story, but I realized I was butting up against my rule that I shouldn’t share art from an open wound. So instead y’all nerds got an RSS rant! I’m sure Sam Low was happy about that. As for the rest of you… I don’t know why you’re still subscribed, but I’m glad you are :D.

Until tomorrow at 10:03 pm, buzz on, my busy bees!