RSS is the quiet superpower of the open web
A 25-year-old standard that nobody markets is doing more for independent reading than every modern feed combined.
RSS is one of those technologies that should have died ten years ago and somehow keeps getting more useful. It's a plain text format that lets a website publish a list of its latest posts. Any reader app can subscribe and pull updates whenever it wants. There's no algorithm, no platform, no middleman. Just a feed.
For a while it looked like RSS was on its way out. Google killed Reader. Twitter and Facebook stopped showing it any love. Most people stopped knowing what the orange icon meant.
Then the platforms got worse, and people started looking for ways to read writers they liked without depending on whatever the feed surfaced that day. RSS was sitting there the whole time. It still works. Almost every blog still publishes a feed, even when its homepage doesn't advertise it. Most modern reader apps are good. A few are great.
If you find a writer you like on the small web, scroll to their footer. There's a 90% chance they have a feed. Add it to your reader. Now you'll see every new post, in the order they wrote it, without an algorithm getting in the way. That's a small but enormous quality-of-life upgrade for being online.