Complaintificate

This is an increíble thing that happens when trying to follow that subscribe link to the newsletter

yeah I know that's the joke

actually lemme explain the joke cause this is genuinely useful information and probably a ton of people just don't know about this anymore:

So this is what's called an RSS Feed

it looks like a bunch of data code nonsense because that's exactly what it is: a series of big blocks of data that tell you things like: what each of the last [number] of blog posts are, what the title of each is, what the date for each is... and actually I think I serve the entire content of each post through the feed so there's also a bunch of html formatting in there, image files, and so on. for the record, it doesn't look like that for me because I have a plugin (RSS Preview on Firefox) that can take that data and render it like this:

RSS files are just periodically updated documents--text docs, you can write them in notepad if you really wanted to!--that lives at a url on your website. Plug that URL into a "reader" and it'll periodically call my website up and check if there's changes to the data in the feed. if there's a new entry, it'll drop that into your feed and alert you to the fact that I've posted a new article. I've seen a few different claims of what RSS stands for but the one I like is "Really Simple Syndication". because it is really simple! I just have a bulletin board on my site that posts new information, and then your little robot goes around town checking all the bulletin boards and bringing the information back to you. you may instead visualize this as a kobold, army of hypno drone minions, &c, whatever's your fancy.

the best part from my perspective is that I don't need to have your email or deal with your service provider's (probably google's) opaque spam policies. if it's on my feed, you or anyone else can just call up the url whenever you want and find my stuff. it also means I don't have to update at a particular time on a particular day of the week and the feed keeps working months or years between updates, which gives this major major advantages over sticking a website into a bookmark folder somewhere on your browser and just reminding yourself to check it periodically. we have robots (kobolds &c) to do that for us! so, the joke here is that you can "sign up for my substack newsletter" by just... putting a url, into your program of choice, without worrying about whether I'm going to sell your email. it's just one of many things that makes blogs better than substacks.

the big question that I don't have a great answer for is what you do with the url. there's a LOT of readers out there, but there was sort of a collapse of the ecosystem and blogging as a whole after the fuckers at google obliterated Google Reader, which was the eponymous rss reader, from the eponymous google. it's like the fourth worst thing they've done after replacing their own search with LLM slop, monopolizing the ad market, and worst of all discontinuing Google Wave. that said, the fact that the market is quite fragmented is imo an opportunity to play around and find a reader that works for you. I'm using a fork of a fork that you can only get through github that looks like it was programmed in 2006 because it probably originally was, but I also just started parsing my gmail through firefox's email frontend Thunderbird, and that has a web calendar (also like rss--you can read about that here) AND an RSS reader built in, so I want to explore that and see if it's a solid modern alternative. I tend to gravitate towards programs that let me be a power user--because these feeds have a ton of data potentially you can do things like automatically discard, say, news articles with tags you're uninterested in, or move some articles to a particular "inbox" folder to make sure you see them, and a really powerful reader will let you automate that process.

that said if all you want is a simple reader that lives in the cloud and syncs up your webcomic library... there's definitely options for that!

and oh yeah, did I forget to mention? a LOT LOT LOT of webcomics still use RSS. it's actually the biggest thing I use my reader for, and why I'm keeping up with so many more webcomics again.

not that they always make it easy to find. dumbing of age for example has the rss feed aaaaall the way at the bottom:

Kill Six Billion Demons has it right at the top, but you might not recognize it. it's that orange icon at the end that looks sorta like a cartoon radio transmitter:

once again I recommend using the RSS Preview extension, which helpfully adds a little icon to my firefox url bar when it detects a link to an RSS feed. it makes it way way easier to find these things than having to hunt around all over a page for that little orange icon or a link that just says "Subscribe". it's not a perfect tool (I just noticed it doesn't detect the rss feed on Gwyn's blog despite it having a big link at the top of the page saying "RSS"!) but for someone just starting to set up a library it's invaluable imo

oh and fun fact: for a long time substack *was not aware* that if you followed a blog through rss... they were just serving paywalled content directly over the feed. like, I was just casually reading through paywalled articles without a care in the world, right there in my reader. they caught on to their screwup sadly but it was fun while it lasted. and hey, it still works for bypassing all the intrusive ugly bullshit that a substack throws at you when you're reading on their website.

so in a very real way, rss IS a way to subscribe to a substack!

so everyone go out and sign up for my substack newsletter today: