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Linked – This is the year of the RSS reader. (Really!)

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

I have heard this before, but is the Twitter situation going to be the thing that moves the needle for RSS? I started using Revue to send newsletters last year as an option for people who were trying to follow my websites on social media but ran into the algorithm deciding not to show them anything that was being posted, especially with Facebook Pages. It had some subscribers but not that many. After Twitter killed Revue, I also moved to Substack and have seen some growth, but I also realize that we can’t replicate Twitter with email newsletters.

Contrary to what The New York Times has speculated, we are not at peak newsletter. We are just at peak newsletter via email delivery. The 10% of people who claim that email newsletters are their primary form of news consumption include among them the most anal, powerful, and high-net worth people in the country.

I predict that these people won’t stand for a universe where their email becomes ever more crowded just because of Elon Musk mucking up Twitter. The only way to survive in a world where multiple DC-insider publications are launching multiple newsletters and Twitter is no longer socially acceptable is to use an RSS reader that satisfies the intelligentsia and political elite.

They are right about one thing. RSS fixes this problem. It fixes the reliance on social media algorithms to show me what I really want to see. It does, however, come with a little bit of a learning curve. It’s not that difficult, though. Good feed readers (I use Feedly myself) will take the URL of a site and look for the RSS feed. Many sites have the RSS feed linked somewhere, and good newsletters will also have an RSS version, so you can subscribe to the newsletter in your RSS reader instead of your inbox.

Mine is here – https://mikemcbride.substack.com/feed/ 

I’d love for you to subscribe to the newsletter through Substack and email because there may be some opportunities to interact with all of you through the Substack app, but if email newsletters aren’t your thing, grab the RSS for the newsletter or grab the RSS just for this site and not everything else that gets added to the newsletter. Don’t rely on any social media platform to get your news and information. Take some time to locate and build your own trusted sources to follow and then use RSS to make sure that’s what you are seeing when you want to stay up to date.

If you want to try out RSS Readers but don’t know where to start, let me know. Happy to help you!

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/12/this-is-the-year-of-the-rss-reader-really/

Updated to add another link – Curated Consumption: A Saner Approach to Online Media

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