I write a small blog about offline tools and the Android apps I build. From day one I decided there would be no newsletter, no tracking and no sign-up of any kind. The only way to follow it is a plain RSS 2.0 file, feed.xml, which updates itself with every new post and never moves. The reasoning was simple: a newsletter is a list of email addresses that someone owns, and sooner or later that list has to be protected, sold or breached. With a feed there is no list at all. Your reader asks the site for the file whenever it wants, I don't know who reads it or how many people do, and unsubscribing just means deleting the address from your reader. Nothing is left on my side because nothing was ever created. After a few months, what I like most is that there's no account, no email and no consent box to tick. No algorithm decides what you see, so you get every post, and no platform sits in the middle, because the reader talks straight to the site. The file is served like any other page, with no cookies and no tracking scripts. It also made me appreciate how quietly RSS kept running in the background. It dates back to 1999, and every podcast app still reads an RSS feed when you "subscribe" to a show, even if most people never notice. I wrote up the full reasoning (plus a short FAQ for readers who had never heard of feeds) here: https://survival-apps.com/en/transmissions/033-rss-feed-without-masters/ Curious how others here handle it: if you run a site, do you offer only a feed, or a feed plus email? And as readers, do you skip sites that only offer a newsletter?   submitted by   /u/FineWatch61   to   r/rss [link]   [comments]