RSS — Really Simple Syndication — is a web standard that lets readers subscribe to a site and receive its content automatically, without visiting the site directly. It was a foundational technology of the early web and, despite decades of platforms built to replace it, it has never gone away. RSS is the kind of technology that proves its worth precisely because it has no business model.
The feeds
Some Was True publishes two feeds:
- Days feed — one item per day, containing all entries published that day. This is the primary feed and the one to subscribe to if you want to read the site as a whole.
- Items feed — one item per individual entry (post, link, photo, article). Useful if you want finer-grained control in a feed reader that lets you filter by type.
Most feed readers can also discover these feeds automatically from the site’s URL. If yours doesn’t, you can paste either link above directly into your reader.
Some history
This site is the continuation of Daystream, a personal journal I published at daystream.com from 2011 onward. RSS was part of the site from the beginning. I’ve always thought of subscribing to a feed as a fundamentally different relationship with a site than following an account on a social platform — one you own, one you don’t.
When I migrated the archive to Some Was True and rebuilt the publishing stack from scratch as a static site generator, restoring the RSS feeds was one of the first things I did. It didn’t feel optional.
Why it matters
The web’s original promise was that content could travel freely — that you could link to anything, aggregate anything, read anything in whatever context you chose. RSS is one of the few durable expressions of that promise. It puts the reader in control of their own reading experience, independent of the site’s design, the platform’s algorithm, or the author’s preferred distribution channel.
I believe that full distribution of content — making it available without friction, without login walls, without truncated excerpts designed to drive traffic — is essential to how ideas actually spread and connect. Syndication enables discovery: someone encounters a link in their feed reader and shares it somewhere else, and that’s how the network actually works. It enables interoperability: a feed can be consumed by a reader, piped into a script, archived, or remixed. And it enables collaboration: when content is available as data, other people can build things with it.
RSS isn’t nostalgia for a better internet. It’s an infrastructure decision. It’s mortar.
If you read sites through a feed reader and Some Was True isn’t in your list, it should be.