Roughly a year ago, I started using RSS feeds to aggregate news. I had always seen that ubiqitous RSS icon on hundreds of websites, but I had never realised what they were actually for.
RSS feeds are provided by many websites
As purely a news aggregator, beyond the obvious benefit of giving you the ability to browse content from as many sources as you like, the main benefit of news consumption via RSS is one that becomes more and more important every passing day - Impartiality
The Apolitics of Time
Since most news apps use algorithms to present you with content they think you'll like, this means that when it comes to the news and politics, you're going to see mainly content that aligns with your political views, which can lead to an "echo-chamber"-esque effect where you never see anything that makes you doubt your views. The larger-scale impact of this is that if everyone is only consuming content that aligns with their personal philosophies, everyone becomes more and more convicted in their views creating widespread polarisation, which can be seen more and more in the world.
RSS feeds provide a simple and straightforward alternative to this - each item is listed in chronological order, with the newest first. Simply keep a varied collection of news sources, and you should always be getting a variety of recent but unfiltered content. The only biases here are created by what feeds you have on your RSS viewer.
RSS is everywhere!
When I first started using RSS, it was purely to browse the news in a way where I could aggregate many sources. But, my eyes were soon opened to the possibilities. When I open my RSS reader, (newsboat btw), I see not only my favourite news sources, but also my favourite small blogs, since RSS is so simple to setup. Even this blog has one!
But you can go further - youtube channels, for example, all have an RSS feed. If you're using Invidious, the little RSS icon in the top right of a channel's page will link you to their RSS feed - you can also get their feed directly from youtube, albeit it is slightly more complicated. Now I don't even have to start my browser to check if the channels I'm interested in have posted. But it goes deeper! Github also has RSS feeds, however they are hidden in the source for a page, but simply go on a github page's source and Ctrl+F for ".atom" and you'll find the RSS feed for that page. (.xml and .atom are the two most common types of feed)
I don't really use Twitter anyways, but I still keep track of some of my friend's Twitters using RSS feeds. As with youtube, I use a privacy-friendly front-end to twitter called nitter.net which provides RSS feeds for twitter accounts.
All of this has effectively turned my RSS viewer into not just a virtual newspaper, but a hub for all the content I could want to consume, presented efficiently, quickly, and easily.
I cannot recommend RSS feeds enough - and the more people use them, the greater the already huge list of sites offering them will be!