Websites proudly displayed RSS badges with links to their feeds, Apple CEO Steve Jobs talked about Safari’s RSS features for five whole minutes during the WWDC 2004 keynote, and Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer could subscribe to RSS readers. In the 2000s and early 2010s, RSS was a much more recognizable technology. It’s not just for news, though - YouTube channels can be RSS feeds, most podcasts use RSS for distribution, Reddit has great RSS support (for the moment), and many remote monitoring platforms can deliver messages through RSS. Many news websites and blogs provide RSS feeds for new articles, and subscribing to them with an RSS reader allows you to see content from different places in one organized view. RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, is a feed format for updates to web content. However, even if you use those already or didn’t care about Twitter or Reddit in the first place, you should consider trying out an RSS reader. There are alternatives to both Twitter and Reddit - Mastodon is the most direct replacement for Twitter, and Lemmy is gaining traction as a Reddit replacement. Third-party apps made that information more accessible, searchable, and enjoyable, and now all of them are gone or about to be gone. Despite the many problems with both platforms, there’s no denying that Twitter has been an important source for news (especially for independent journalism) over the years, and Reddit is a treasure trove of valuable discussions and shared knowledge. So, in just a few months, dozens of popular apps for accessing two significant social media platforms and news sources died. That’s especially a loss for mobile devices - Reddit’s official mobile app is poorly designed, broken for some people with accessibility issues, and still loaded with NFT garbage. The developers for Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Reddit Sync, and others have confirmed that their apps are shutting down. Reddit apparently thinks that was a great idea because it also announced changes to its API that would make them cost-prohibitive for all third-party apps. There was no way for third-party apps to cover the new API costs, so all of them shut down, with some of the developers moving on to creating Mastodon apps. That included charging significantly more money for access to Twitter’s API, which third-party apps like Fenix, Tweetbot, and Twitterific relied on for all functionality. Twitter shut down all third-party apps earlier in 2023, as Elon Musk (the platform’s new owner) tried to boost revenue to compensate for rapidly declining revenue. If you want to curate your own news feed, it’s time to party like it’s 2005 and set up an RSS reader. Twitter and Reddit are both cracking down on third-party apps and connected services while making the official apps and sites worse.
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