Sorry, I left out the part where most RSS fetchers are not hosted by the user. Of course it is self-hostable, but that’s by far the less common use case.

Images and CSS aren’t natively a part of RSS, though (and in fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen an RSS feed or reader that tries to do any CSS rendering at all). Assuming you have a third party downloading your RSS XML, all of the tracking capabilities are outside of the RSS spec itself, and dependent on you clicking on a link or something after you get the RSS feed.

Looks like it’s going to be super chill this weekend, too. Extra super chill, even.

It’s also worth noting, if you’re not familiar with the US map, that the city of Minneapolis (where the anti-ICE protests are happening right now) is right about where the bottom of the “R” in “TREE” is on this map.

The United States is very big. If you’re from a smaller country (particularly if it’s smaller east-to-west), it can be a little bit hard to comprehend how different the weather can be from one part of the country to another. While the weather does typically travel from West to East, it can change significantly along the way, and it usually takes several days to get from one coast to the other.

The highlighted area on the map is a massive region, wider than France and Germany put together (though much less populated). In fact, it’s quite rare for even this much of the country to have the same weather pattern. The simplest answer to why trees to the east and west are safe is that it’s not as cold there.

There are some other factors, too: just past the Western edge of the highlighted region are the Rocky Mountains, which significantly change weather patterns. The highlighted region consists of remarkably flat land (leveled by glacial action), meaning that there’s not much to break the wind as it sucks away the heat from the trees. To the East if this highlighted region are the Great Lakes, which also change weather patterns.

But the biggest answer is, it’s just not as cold there. Cleveland, OH (at a similar latitude, but further to the East) is going to be almost 20°F warmer than this (which is still bone-chilling, but not tree-exploding), and Boise, ID (similar latitude but to the West) is going to be almost 40°F warmer (practically tropical! /s).

If you want news and articles from the sites you appreciate to come to you directly and not be filtered through social media first, RSS is what you want. You get every link, and often the full text of every post, and you aren’t at the whim of an algorithm.

Spam-free? It’s literally only what you’ve specifically asked it to deliver you. If a site starts spamming its RSS feed, you just unsubscribe from the site.

Tracker-free? There’s literally no way anyone could track you through RSS. It’s just an XML file and can’t run any arbitrary code.

I use it for everything I can: news sites, blogs, YouTube channels, social media feeds for people whose content I don’t want to miss. There are even services that will let you subscribe to an email newsletter through one of their inboxes, and they’ll convert it to an RSS feed for you to follow so it doesn’t clog up your actual inbox. I especially like reading webcomics through it; it makes sure I get everything, and I don’t lose my place, get spoiled by a later post, or have to rely on the whims of social media.

I love RSS.

Interesting. That’s the one thing I would miss the most about bailing on Nova. I’ll have to check this out.

Wow. I could code up that “AI” in an afternoon, and I wouldn’t even need an LLM for it.

“Most people?” Sounds like you’ve gotten yourself into a filter bubble, my friend. Only two people I know use it regularly, but adjusting for my own filter bubble, I think most people have played with it a couple of times, found it wanting, and maybe use Gemini in the Google search results when it comes up.

If it doesn’t have wide adoption, it isn’t a boom. It’s just sparkling speculation.

Yeah, for sure. Though if you drink it fast enough, it won’t warm the drink noticeably before it’s gone.

Great at conduction, but with not a lot of thermal mass, meaning that actually your drink will usually just make whatever it’s touching (your hand, often) super cold or hot.