Cory Doctorow did a nice piece today on why you should be using RSS. As usual, he’s much more eloquent than I, but he makes the main points that RSS puts you back in control of your news and information feeds and is resistant to tracking, ad injection, and creepy analytics. RSS is available almost everywhere (except, of course, the really toxic sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X which don’t want you to have any control). I’m a fan of RSS, and it’s nice to see the old protocol getting new attention.
Sadly, an article in Ars Technica today talks about how Cloudflare is increasingly blocking RSS. Cloudflare is a huge player on the internet, though you might not have encountered them directly. They offer websites protection against denial-of-service attacks and are used by around 20% of sites on the Web. What a lot of site operators might not realize is that signing up with Cloudflare’s free service gives the company access to all their Web traffic: they can launch man-in-the-middle attacks and steal all information that unsuspecting users exchange with the site you think you’re protecting. So they can take a great, privacy-respecting independent web site and compromise it terribly. I don’t know a lot about the company, but they give off an arrogant vibe, quick to shout “free speech!” when accused to enabling fascist, racist, harassing content but also willing to shut down sites when it’s in their interests to do so. For example, I’m a big believer in Tor, a technology for reclaiming privacy and anonymity on the ‘net, but Cloudflare often blocks Tor and even blocks volunteer contributors to the Tor system. They deny that they do it, but they do. When pushed, they’ll claim it’s because their users want it that way or don’t understand their configuration, but those excuses don’t change the fact that Cloudflare is Tor-hostile. To hear that they’re now going after RSS (even if it’s due to incompetence or ignorance rather than spite) makes me sad and concerned.
—2p