The Keeper of the Forgotten Feed: On the Last User of RSS
In a quiet corner of the internet, far from the algorithmic churn of social feeds, there is a man I know only as Elias. His digital existence is anachronistic, governed by a rhythm that the rest of the web has long abandoned. He is, for all intents and purposes, the last dedicated user of RSS.
Elias does not scroll. He reviews. Each morning, a specific application opens on his machine, a tool that would look arcane to most. It is a river of text, a stark list of headlines and summaries flowing from a curated list of sources he has personally vetted over fifteen years. There are no images vying for his attention, no autoplaying videos, no ‘likes’ from distant acquaintances. There is only the quiet, sequential arrival of thought, one post after another, from weblogs and journals most have forgotten.
To watch him read is to observe a lost art. He clicks a headline, and the full text renders in a clean, reader-mode pane. He reads, completely. When he is done, he marks it as read. The item vanishes from his list, and he moves to the next. The process is methodical, almost liturgical. There is no infinite scroll, no bottomless well of content designed to trap him. When the list is empty, his reading is done for the day. The system has a clear, satisfying terminus.
His curation is his creed. Adding a new feed is a solemn occasion, a decision weighed over weeks. He speaks of ‘feed hygiene’ not as a productivity hack, but as a moral imperative—a way to honor his attention and the work of the writers he follows. A source that becomes bloated with clickbait or off-topic musings is not angrily denounced; it is simply, and sadly, pruned. The connection is severed without ceremony.
In an age of discovery engines and predictive feeds, Elias’s practice seems solitary, even lonely. But he argues the opposite is true. “The algorithm is the real solitude,” he told me once. “It reflects you back at yourself, a funhouse mirror of your own past clicks. My feed reader is a window. I decide what’s on the other side. I am connected to those specific minds, not to a demographic pattern of engagement.”
He is not a technologist clinging to the past for nostalgia’s sake. He is a reader who found a system that respected his time and his intellect, and he never saw a reason to leave. In his steadfast routine, Elias embodies a powerful truth: that the most radical act of personal knowledge management is not to adopt the new, but to consciously retain the old that still serves you well. He is the keeper of a forgotten feed, tending a fire that everyone else believes has gone cold.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: