Replacing Social Media Noise with RSS Feeds

It is far too easy to lose hours and days into social media and news feeds that could otherwise be productive. In this article I talk a little about how I have used RSS feeds this year to avoid most social media and news sites, providing more focus to my reading time. I’ll also talk about where that has not been possible.

I talked in an earlier article about how I had begun to use micro.blog to consolidate my own internet presence, replacing almost all of my personal projects into a single Hugo, micro.blog powered website.

I’ve similarly aimed to cut down the amount of time that I have spent in the past aimlessly wandering around the digital universe reading crap. So much more than replacing my various web projects, that site also replaces any interactions I previously had on Twitter, Instagram etc through the activityPub / Mastodon API integrations.

Consuming news is another area where it is possible to get sucked into a vacuum of nothingness, either through reading news on social media sites, or endlessly trawling the media outlets that inevitably leads towards.

To prevent that I have set Screentime preferences within MacOS/iOS that prevent viewing most news sites. I also stumbled back upon RSS feeds which I’ve not really used for a decade or longer. By controlling RSS subscriptions very tightly, I have an application that gives me selected news that I have chosen about the subjects I actually want to read about:

Burnley FC

Web design and development

Human rights law

Burnley FC

Cycling

Constitutional Law

Burnley FC

I primarily use an application called Unread RSS to do so. I think I originally stumbled across it as a shoutout in the @gluon archived copy micro.blog client. Unread does have some disadvantages, so if you are not using iOS, or you want to use on the desktop, it will not be the feed reader for you - though most have a similar feature set. On my Chromebook for example I use an application called Feeder instead.

Opening up in Unread I am presented with a chronological list of articles from the feeds that I have opted to subscribe to. As I have subscribed to Unread, I am able to use the application to cache articles and the media within them for reading - which is important as my phone has connection in public and transit, but always objects to me doing anything with it!

In reading the article there are a number of things that I can then do with it. I can save for future reading, copy, message or mail the link to the article, mail the article content. I can even add articles to my safari reading list. If I want to, I can click through to the article on the web.

There are a number of reasons why reading in an RSS reader might be preferable though: - No adverts - No tracking cookies - Cleaner reading experience So I have unread set to retrieve the article and embedded media, not just the more limited abstract from the feed itself.

I’ve not managed to get rid of all traditional media channels though. I’m still stick with Facebook, which most of the virtual cycling groups that I’m involved with still use to organise themselves. Though many have embraced Discord, most of the organising still happens over on Facebook (I’m not sure Discord is much healthier in any event). Similarly with Messenger, as certain people still only talk to me on Messenger, it means that I cannot get rid of Meta completely - though I have managed to pretty much abandon Instagram, and its sibling Threads.