Mastodawn

News organizations are increasingly launching newsletters in hopes of building a more direct relationship with readers, as traffic from platforms they once relied on — like social media and Google Search — continues to shrink.

But the explosion in newsletters is overwhelming as a reader. Instead of one paper with a dozen writers, you’ve got a dozen newsletters scattered across your inbox.

What if you could curate your own custom newspaper? All your favorite writers, no spam, no surveillance.

Although I regularly read about “the death of RSS”, RSS is still alive and well, and I’ve been using it for more than a decade. Here’s how you can too.

1. Choose an RSS reader. I use Inoreader, but there are a bunch of options out there (free and paid, mobile/web/desktop). Switching between them is pretty easy, so you don’t have to agonize over this too much.

2. Add your sites. Try searching for feeds on the newsletters/blogs/websites you read the most (like Citation Needed!) You can even put in YouTube channels, or Mastodon or BlueSky feeds.

If you need ideas, I publish some of my blogroll: https://mollywhite.net/blogroll/

Some websites don’t publish RSS feeds — often paywalled websites or newsletters. Increasingly, RSS readers are incorporating features that allow you to send newsletters to your feed reader via email, and there are also services like Kill the Newsletter that can do this for you.

Molly White

3. Read! As you use RSS more, you can make different “newspapers” for different purposes.

And don’t forget to support writers — whose subscription reminders may be less noticeable in RSS feeds. Most newsletters allow you to pay for a subscription but disable email delivery, if you (like me) prefer to read in your RSS reader rather than your email client.

RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries.

Citation Needed has a full-text RSS feed regardless of whether you subscribe, so consider adding it to your feed reader! https://citationneeded.news/rss/

And consider signing up for a pay-what-you-want subscription to help me continue this work. https://www.citationneeded.news/signup/

Christoff, the human Jul 31

@molly0xfff added, appreciate it

Étienne Parmentier Jul 31

@molly0xfff Thanks ! I decided to switch to RSS recently, and I was a bit disappointed that only your newsletter is fully readable inside my rss reader. Why do you think that is ?

@tinylittleenormous a lot of the blogs and newsletters I follow (https://www.mollywhite.net/blogroll/) offer full-text RSS, but as I mention in the article, it’s not universal. For newsletters, the email-to-RSS option may help?

Blogroll

A list of blogs Molly White likes to read.

Molly White

Bob Tregilus Jul 31

@molly0xfff Great toot on social & traditional media, enshittification, newsletters, & RSS feeds, Molly! You wrote, "What if you could take all your favorite newsletters, ditch the data collection, and curate your own newspaper?...Only the stuff you want to see, all in one place, ready to read at your convenience." As I'm sure you know echo chambers are the public's media heroin. A big loss are ethical professional editors who once curated the news resulting in people *discovering* new things.

@elaterite I would consider that to be “the stuff you want to see” — you can still subscribe to curated publications using RSS.

Bob Tregilus Aug 1

@molly0xfff Indeed! I'm just lamenting the loss of old-fashioned local newspapers. True they still exist, but they are a shadow of what they were pre-internet. Nearly solid ads, poor editing, and now a growing number of LLM articles (that it often seems an editor never even bothered to look at). :/

BSM (sw.s) 🇨🇭Jul 31

@molly0xfff I love #RSS and have been using it quite intensively for more than 10 years, but most of that time with a self-hosting solution. For the last few years, it has been #FreshRSS.

Pete Prodoehl 🍕Jul 31

@bsm @molly0xfff I think I've been using RSS for 25 years! FreshRSS is great (just got it running earlier this year) and yeah, huge fan of this holdover from the original indieweb.

Tristan

Aug 2

@rasterweb @bsm @molly0xfff +1 for FreshRSS. Self hostable and pretty easy to live with.

GadgetGav Jul 31

@molly0xfff Thanks Molly! I remember NetNewsWire from back in the day but recently I’ve been signing up for lots of newsletters (including yours). As my inbox fills up and as I want to stop supporting anything on Substack, this was a timely post to prompt me to download an RSS reader and organize what I read.

Pete Prodoehl 🍕Jul 31

@gadgetgav @molly0xfff @NetNewsWire is still around! I use it with FreshRSS running on my own server for the best of both worlds. :)

GadgetGav Jul 31

@rasterweb @molly0xfff @NetNewsWire I was today years old when I discovered that!😀 Just downloaded it and will move my newsletters over to it over the next day or so.

@gadgetgav @molly0xfff @NetNewsWire

Mr. Teatime 2d ago

@rasterweb
So, here's what I've been looking for ever since ditching Opera 12 as e-mail/RSS client:

A local RSS client (easy, most e-mail clients will do, plus a lot of browser extensions) which stores its data on what's been read or not in one handy directory that can be easily synced across all my devices (using e.g. syncthing, which I have going), in such a way that it works on bith Linux and Android.

The beauty of RSS is that no 3rd party needs to know what I'm reading, and having an online RSS aggregator kind of defeats that purpose unless I self-host, which is a fairly high barrier to entry if you ask me. I could deal with it but I'd prefer not to.

aneel Jul 31

@molly0xfff The problem is that your full text feed doesn’t have the elegant treatment of footnotes/sidenotes from your website, so I often click through from my RSS reader anyway!

Massimo

6d ago

@molly0xfff Honest question. Do you think the news landscape would be different if RSS had a built in method to manage paid subscriptions? As in (1) subscriber would get the full article, others just the preview; (2) non-subscribers would ask for the full article for a small fee. All of this integrated in the protocol somehow. Of course this would be enormously more difficult than just "put this static xml file online".

Molly White 6d ago

@massimolauria I think the issues in the media landscape have a lot more fundamental origins than the mechanics of subscribing to a newspaper, sadly

Massimo

6d ago

@molly0xfff I agree. Tech-solutions rarely solve societal problems. I am just sad that it is difficult to bring paid material (on which authors and independent media could survive) on the beloved RSS platform.

Gary Parker

Jul 31

@molly0xfff something I learned recently: you can add Releases pages on GitHub to your RSS reader and get notified of new software 👍

cerement Jul 31

@WiteWulf @molly0xfff

go to a github discussions page and tack on '.atom' to the end of the url

slash Jul 31

@molly0xfff @mwl

This was a terrific write-up. I read Cory's piece when it was published, and tried a reader. But it would just launch a web browser, which kind of defeats the point of a quick overview without surveillance. I didn't realize that wasn't the way they all worked, until I read your piece. Now I'm running Capy on my LineageOS phone, and it's working beautifully.

I run some servers, and I'm thinking I should have them publish to (a private) RSS feed instead of sending me email.

Exostence Jul 31

@molly0xfff The RSS feeds were a huge thing a few years ago, until many websites began to remove them. This article (https://andrewblackman.net/2025/05/no-rss-isnt-dead/#:~:text=Big%20tech%20companies%20realised%20they,killed%20off%20that%20feature%20in%E2%80%A6) is a worthwhile read, I think.

No, RSS isn't dead! - Andrew Blackman

Here's my take on why the much-maligned RSS feed is the technology we need for accessing the chaotic, confusing internet of 2025.

Andrew Blackman

RaymondPierreL3 Aug 1

@exostence
ANy suggestions for an RSS reader on iPad (no in app purchases, foss, etc…)?

Exostence Aug 1

@RaymondPierreL3 this reddit thread discusses a few:
https://www.reddit.com/r/rss/comments/167n2lk/whats_the_best_rss_reader_for_ios_thats_not/

Net news reader appears to be open source.

Ayo Ayco Aug 1

@molly0xfff I default to reading emails more than the RSS feed. Out of curiosity, do you subscribe to newsletters yourself or have RSS subscriptions only? :)

Fazal Majid Aug 1

@molly0xfff I still can’t understand why publishers didn’t band together to create a common RSS reader like Google Reader, with subscription and micropayments, instead of entrusting their entire business to the capricious social media overlords.

Can confirm.

@molly0xfff a few additions to your great thread.

1) one way I use (though not as much a I would like to) mastodon’s rss feeds is to subscribe to my “bookmarks” feed from my mastodon account in my rss feed. That lets me bookmark anything I find that I want to refer back to later while avoiding the many other posts in my feed less suited for an rss reader

2) I wonder if someone could add a “support your writers” feature to an rss reader that pulls out the support links from your specific feeds

Jesper Tingvall Aug 1

@molly0xfff i love my little rss reader.