Internet – nadreck.me

RSS and how I use it

August 10, 2025

Based on some conversations after my last post, there was some curiosity about how I personally end up using RSS and what seems to work for me.

Start with an RSS reader that feels good to you. It’s not one size fits all, you may want a different experience than me. A lot of them are free (and most of the rest at least have a free trial) so there’s no harm in trying a few out. I’ve been using Vienna (which just celebrated 20 years of development).
Then start figuring out which sites or content you want coming your way. You can start with blogs you already read, and can see if any of the newsletters you’re part of might feel better as a feed. Then let it accumulate and keep adding as you bump into stuff around the internet.
It’s better to let your subscribed feeds build up naturally than it is to dive right into a firehose. Personally I don’t like leaving things unread, so I try to find a sweet spot where if I’m reading daily, it feels manageable in a reasonable amount of time.
While things come in chronologically, you don’t have to read them chronologically. There are some days where I’m just not in the mood for a longer, deeper post. It’s okay to punt and read those later.
Most people aren’t particularly prolific, so it’s generally fine to have more feeds than you’d otherwise expect.
That said, some folks ARE high volume. Like, Wil Wheaton posts regularly on his Tumblr. But they tend to be quick pithy things or sharing a quick picture or meme, so it’s like a quick palate cleanse to quickly scan through them. But when I got busy and didn’t read my feeds for a week, and I came back to 197 unread posts, I didn’t feel bad about just marking the entire feed as read. If I really want, I can always go back and read them later.
It’s your own personal feed collection. Don’t feel obligated to keep subscribed if you’re not enjoying the content. Especially if they tend to be high frequency, long content. If there’s not a compelling reason (the writing is exceptional, I know them personally and want to keep up with them, the topics they cover are interesting enough that it’s worth the slog), I just unsubscribe. I tend to keep the feed around, just disabled, in case I want to revisit it later.
Find a consistent time to go through your feeds. Some folks are morning readers. I tend to go through my feeds after work as sort of a wind-down. The point is to find a routine that works for you, as RSS works best (in my opinion) when it’s built into your day rather than an occasional afterthought. (Looping back to Molly’s newspaper metaphor, a newspaper works best when read daily, rather than letting a week or two build up to slog through all at once.)

Of course, your mileage may vary. RSS is a protocol and a tool, not a methodology or system – find what works best for you. Hope that helps!

Over at Citation Needed, Molly White has a nice piece on how you can Curate your own newspaper with RSS. If you’re not reading Molly’s work already, you really should, especially if you care about what’s happening in the tech sector (mostly a mix of web3/crypto, and tech’s impacts on human rights and freedoms).

The basic gist is that RSS is a tried and true protocol that tons of services already have running but don’t do a great job of advertising, and it lets you read things at your pace, in an easily digestible, consistent format. I’ve been saying similar for ages, but I think she makes a more compelling argument for it, not the least of which being that it’s a lynchpin in how she gets her job done.

What if you could take all your favorite newsletters, ditch the data collection, and curate your own newspaper? It could include independent journalists, bloggers, mainstream media, worker-owned media collectives, and just about anyone else who publishes online. Even podcast episodes, videos from your favorite YouTube channels, and online forum posts could slot in, too. Only the stuff you want to see, all in one place, ready to read at your convenience. No email notifications interrupting your peace (unless you want them), no pressure to read articles immediately. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Molly White

I initially saw this article as a link in Blue Sky… but when I actually had a chance to read it, it was in my RSS reader.

A few quick links about the web

January 10, 2024

Some quick links I wanted to capture. First, Joan Westenberg, writing “I miss the internet.” I miss it, too.

The homogeneity of the modern web is disheartening. Every website and platform is just a slight variation on a handful of templates. The eccentricity, the vibrant individuality, and the raw expression that once pulsated across the net all seem to have been replaced by either an inoffensive, user-friendly sameness or an algorithm-endorsed near-genocidal mania of hate speech that is somehow deemed socially acceptable.

Worse still, today’s internet is a place of scrutiny, surveillance, and unprecedented data exploitation. We’ve traded our privacy and autonomy for the convenience and connectivity it provides, and in so doing, have become commodities in an unseen market. In the pursuit of progress and personalization, we have inadvertently sterilized the very essence of the web, transforming it from a shared experience into a solitary echo chamber.
Joan Westenberg, “I miss the internet”

Then Anil Dash wrote a piece for Rolling Stone, and then elaborated on his blog, “The Web Renaissance Takes Off“:

So, while I’m still circumspect and cautious about the very real threats and harms that will come from the worst parts of the major internet platforms, I am more optimistic than I’ve been in a long time about the massive potential of the human internet to come roaring back in a way that we haven’t seen in a generation. More and more, I think of it as “the people’s web”. And like so many things that come from, and by, the power of the people, it’s a movement that can be delayed, or undermined, but increasingly I have come to believe that it cannot possibly be truly stopped.
Anil Dash, “The Web Renaissance Takes Off”

(I appreciate the optimism of it, and remain somewhat hopeful as well.)

Next, from Jason, a post asking “Where have all the websites gone?” Which feels a bit like an elegy for the internet of yesteryear, while calling out something I’ve felt myself: one of the ways the old internet worked was through the curators, and how essential the sharing was.

We used to know how to do this. Not long ago, we were good at separating the signal from noise. Granted, there’s a lot more noise these days, but most of it comes from and is encouraged by the silos we dwell in.

Somewhere between the late 2000’s aggregator sites and the contemporary For You Page, we lost our ability to curate the web. Worse still, we’ve outsourced our discovery to corporate algorithms. Most of us did it in exchange for an endless content feed. By most, I mean upwards of 90% who don’t make content on a platform as understood by the 90/9/1 rule. And that’s okay! Or, at least, it makes total sense to me. Who wouldn’t want a steady stream of dopamine shots?
Jason, “Where have all the websites gone?”

Worth a read. I like seeing the direction the discourse has been going lately.

Finally, Giles Turnbull issues a challenge to creators and developers: let’s put effort into creating a sea of new tools for the indie web, and let’s make them easy to install and use:

We need more self-hosted platforms for personal publishing that aren’t WordPress. And don’t point me to Hugo or Netlify or Eleventy or all those things – all of them are great, but none of them are simple enough. We need web publishing tools that do not require users to open the Terminal at all. And we need lots of them.

We need a whole galaxy of options.

[…]

It’s not that I hate WordPress. I don’t use it, personally, but I don’t hate it. I can see the benefits of using it. It’s a great tool.

But it needs more competition. People coming fresh to web publishing should have more options.
Giles Turnbull, “Let’s make the indie web easier”

I do use WordPress, and I still agree with the sentiment – the competition is useful to keep all platforms on their toes, and now may be a fantastic opportunity to go back to first principles and see what a tool for putting things on the internet should look like now.

Trying to take off the Cynic Hat

July 7, 2023

I’d started writing a screed here about how Threads’ purported support for interoperation with other services through ActivityPub (an open standard) is a red herring, and how they’ll be locking it down as soon as they hit a critical mass (which I stand by, for what it’s worth – I give it two years before things start shifting, shutting down APIs, breaking interoperability, adding features that “only work in Threads”, putting their thumb on the scales for changes to the standard, etc). But I realized I was wearing my Cynic Hat, and yucking peoples’ yum doesn’t really help. I’ve already mentioned my concerns about their privacy settings and intertwining with Instagram – if, knowing that, you still opt to sign up, that’s up to you, go have fun.

So instead, here’s a few projects that are giving me some hope:

The Flickr Foundation and Wikimedia Commons are partnering to improve the bridge between the services. (For those out of the loop, Flickr has been quietly rebuilding itself since it was acquired by SmugMug back in 2018, and launched a non-profit – the Flickr Foundation – in 2022, to help steward the large body of public domain or creative commons licensed material that had accumulated. I have a soft spot for any project that aims at preservation and responsible sharing of creative work, and this seems like a good one.)
Several museums have begun making available high quality scans of many important works from their archives. Notably, the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art are both doing this. The Creative Law Center has a page with a list of museums part of this effort! (If you haven’t checked the Creative Law Center out, it’s a fantastic resource for explaining things like copyright, trademarks, licensing, and what to do about it all as a creator.)
Tumblr. Hear me out: after seeing it get run into the ground by corporate parent companies (for years!), seeing it get some genuine love and support from their new owners (Automattic, same folks who own WordPress) has been refreshing and appreciated. It has its own culture and customs, and while they’ve made efforts to provide some mechanisms for monetization (gotta pay that server bill somehow, right?), those efforts have very much been in keeping with the nature of the site and the people who use it. Time will tell on whether that’s enough for them to thrive, but that they’re at least trying alternatives to the current de facto default of highly targeted user-data-driven advertising gives me some hope. Obviously I’m more aligned with hosting your own shit, but if that’s not viable for some reason, going somewhere that at least isn’t going to actively sell you to the highest bidder feels like a good next-best alternative.

The Soul of the Web

October 13, 2022

Over at The Atlantic, Kaitlyn Tiffany has an article on The Battle for the Soul of the Web – a headline that may sound a little dramatic, but is touching on some important topics. The article touches on a few different topics, but a central one is about the decentralized web (DWeb), and where that both intersects and contrasts with the Web3 space. It’s an interesting topic that is worth a deeper dive if you care about online spaces at all.

Decades removed from the gonzo highs of blinging GIFs and wacky blogs, the web is now a place where many people feel exploited, manipulated, and tracked; where freedom of speech is being tugged around in a strange culture war; and where the rich get richer.
Among this set, one solution seems to be the consensus favorite. If these problems are intrinsically linked to consolidated tech giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon, why not embrace technologies that decentralize power?
Kaitlyn Tiffany

I’ve been railing against and ranting about information silos for years, so I suppose it’s no surprise that this line of thought might be a little appealing to me. I’ve had a passing interest in the potential of technologies like IPFS for years, for instance, though it remains to be seen how things pan out, and what adoption looks like – how much broad adoption is necessary for a technology or philosophy on technology to sustain itself and become independently viable?

That said, I think they’re at least asking the questions, and that’s a good start:

Nathan Schneider, a media-studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a frequent writer on collectivism and tech, told me. “DWeb asks more,” he said, and dwells on two key questions: “What do we actually want socially, and how do we center those values in our technical designs, so the technical becomes a means to an end, rather than an end in itself?”

There’s obviously some overlap between some decentralized web efforts, and decentralized finance efforts. I hope that the former doesn’t get dragged down because of the latter (or, more specifically, the scam-filled gold-rush that congealed around DeFi in recent times). There’s lots of questions I don’t have answers to about this (perhaps others do?), like how do we make the technology useful, approachable, ubiquitous… without also making it a target for those who want to exert power and control, and exploit it? User congregation around particularly useful or interesting tools or information is inevitable, and with that, how do you prevent just making silos all over again? (Another topic that gives me a headache is how to shepherd information accuracy, and curb disinformation in a world where oversight is virtually impossible?)

Tag: Internet

RSS as Personal Newspaper