Full-text RSS is the best thing since sliced bread

This week, The Verge launched their subscription offering. For $7 (USD) a month or $50 (USD) a year, subscribers get access to all articles, including the newsletters and less ads. The best part of this offering is more subtle; full-text RSS feeds^[1]. In a feed reader, there are no ads, and you can read the articles in whichever style you like. Furthermore, all your articles come to you in one chronological feed, so there is no need to hop between all your favourite websites. Even better, with the full-text available to your RSS reader, you can easily save the article to your favourite read-it-later app. You get complete control, support the journalism you value, and move the needle away from a web focused on advertising and algorithms. This is the future we should be pushing for.

News outlets supporting RSS isn’t new, however usually they only give users an excerpt feed. These feeds will send the title and metadata to your feed reader, and then the first paragraph or two. This forces you to navigate away to the site to read the rest. This benefits the publisher in a few ways:

1. They get to count your view in their statistics, which they can then use to determine which articles are popular, and they can use these tallies in negotiations with advertisers.
2. They can paywall the site to prevent both free access and scraping by AI companies.
3. The overhead is quite a lot less, because there is no need to coordinate individual RSS feeds for each user. If those feeds are abused (such as a subscriber posting their feed publicly for others to use), then it must be reset.

However, recently publications have realised two things: the technology to support individual RSS feeds is now easier to setup (see 404Media’s great story about how they invested in this technology both for themselves and for others to use in the industry), and readers are willing to support journalism they care about. Examples of journalists leaving bigger companies and striking it out on their own are becoming more prevalent, with additional examples including Casey Newton’s Platformer and Taylor Lorenz’s Usermag. The business model used to be getting as many clicks as possible so that you could show more ads, but now it seems to be transitioning to “write quality content to keep an adequate amount of loyal subscribers paying”.

As I wrote about in high quality free news is going extinct, these publications are not cheap relative to what some of the bigger names charge. The New York Times charges just $2 a month, for access to stories written by some of the most well-known names in the industry. Yet, the New York Times will never be a niche publication, it’s the news for everyone. Publications transitioning to the new subscriber model focus more on catering to an audience they know and stay in a specific lane.

How do full-text RSS feeds work?

RSS has been around since 1999, so it isn’t a new technology by any means. It was written in an age where the internet was a lot more open, and individual blogs were some of the biggest players in the scene. Without algorithms, the easiest way to keep track of things would be to either follow blogrolls or to subscribe to a feed. They are were meant to be fairly public, open for all to see and use.

Full-text RSS feeds don’t change much about the fundamentals of how subscribing to a feed works. The only big difference is now that your feed is unique to you and linked to your subscription with a particular publication. Different platforms will implement things slightly differently, or can contract out the technical details to a company like Feedpress. From the subscriber’s perspective, they just need to find the feed link and then import it into their reader of choice.

Getting started with an RSS reader

If you haven’t used RSS before, I would strongly encourage you to give it a go! It’s a lot easier to get setup than you may think. Wired has assembled a list of RSS feeders that they recommend but you certainly don’t have to pay a subscription to have a good experience (after all, you are now paying a subscription fee to get the full-text rss feed in the first place)! For those that are into self-hosting, FreshRSS and Miniflux are both great^[2]. For those on Mac or iOS, NetNewsWire would be my go-to pick.

After you have setup your RSS reader, all you need to do is gather some feeds to input. After the publisher releases something it will appear in your feed.

I really hope that more publishers follow what 404Media and TheVerge are doing (perhaps Wired is next?). Until then, there are always so many individual blogs that also have full-text rss feeds, and have for a long time. With RSS, you can subscribe, unsubscribe, then resubscribe again at your leisure, knowing that the content is coming to you instead of the other way around. Whether you choose to read in nord or catppuccin, the choice is yours — and that’s what really matters.