I feel like I missed this part of internet school.
Lots of websites (news, blogs, etc) have an “RSS” page which is automatically updated every time they make a new post. People have RSS apps, which scan all the RSS pages they’re subscribed to, and can quickly in one place see all the new posts they’re interested in.
Me personally, I have an RSS app that tells me anytime Winehq, This Week in KDE, and Frame.work make a new post
Surprised this comment isn’t up a bit more. Had to scroll a bit to find a correct answer.
As mentioned, RSS is used by RSS readers to keep tabs on constantly updating content.
Typically this would be something like: today’s sports/business stories, every single weather watch issued by the National Weather Service, or the last 10 blog posts on Daring Fireball.
Like most XML-based formats from the early 2000’s, it’s complex, excessively verbose, and hard to read as a human (hello CDATA) but it’s good enough for computers.
What killed it was Google killing off the most popular reader (Google Reader). They did this mostly because people wouldn’t go to the destination websites… which is bad for their pagview metrics.
Ultimately Facebook came along and put everything behind their wall, where no RSS feeds are available.
Since others answered already I’ll just add that if you’re on iOS or macOS I highly recommend https://netnewswire.com/ for an RSS reader. It’s a fantastic, free and open source app. It doesn’t require an account or third party server to use for your feeds.
Seconded! Amazing app. I noted in my own comment you might have to go somewhere else for discovery since there’s no in-app search, but as a reader it’s near perfect.
RSS, is a fantastic thing, which makes it very easy to keep track of updates, news, blog posts, etc… for hundreds of things at the same time… in an easily consumable method.
IMO-
Feedly, is one of the better PAID apps.
FreshRSS is a great self-hosted alternative. This is what I use.
FreshRSS Can this be integrated into a hosted website?
Sure, I’m sure it would squeeze into an iframe just fine.
Going to plug inoreader. Feedly has IMO lost its way, they’re way too focused on selling thousand dollar annual “AI” powered monitoring solutions.
I stopped using it years back, and went to freshrss, when I wanted the simple feature of ignoring certain articles based on the title. But, when I did use it, it did work decently enough.
It stands for Real Simple Syndicate. It’s just an XML file that allows people of other websites to propagate indo provided by another.
Others already explained what is is, I’ll just add that it used to be a popular way of getting news, articles etc. from many sources in one place/app before Facebook happen and everyone moved to subscribing “fanpages”.
Already answered in other comments. I just wanted to add a couple of related communities:
I feel like I missed this part of internet school.
Edit: thank you everyone!
In addition to blogs, RSS is used by podcasts. If you use an app like Spotify, you’re not using RSS, but rather their internal API, which tracks how much of the show you listened to, etc. If you use an RSS based app (overcast is my favorite), you’re often going to be subscribing via an RSS feed.
For podcasting, RSS has advantages and disadvantages. The upside is that it’s about as private as possible. You do show up on someone’s radar when you download episodes, but your podcast player isn’t sending detailed information that can identify you or your listening habits. The disadvantage is mainly for podcasters publishing on RSS: it’s very hard to tell how many listeners you have, and how active they are.
It stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, but you don’t need to know or care about that part.
The part that matters is that you get news from places you trust without the algorithm BS. RSS lets you subscribe to any website you want, and you see all of their new posts, in reverse chronological order, no algorithm. You can (if you have a good reader) filter out subjects you’re not interested in, and just see the stuff you care about.
I recommend trying out Feedly (feedly.com) with a few sites you already follow, and going from there.
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Like federation but you can’t interact with the posts.
