FEED READERS BEAT DOOMSCROLLING
2025-03-22
The news has, in general, been pretty terrible lately.
Like many folks, I've worked to narrow the focus of the things that I'm
willing to care deeply about, because caring about many things is just too
difficult when, y'know, nazis are trying to destroy them all.
I've got friends who've stopped consuming news media entirely. I've not felt
the need to go so far, and I think the reason is that I already have a
moderately-disciplined relationship with news. It's relatively easy for me to
regulate how much I'm exposed to all the crap news in the world and stay
focussed and forward-looking.
The secret is that I get virtually all of my news... through my feed reader
(some of it pre-filtered, e.g. my de-crappified BBC News feeds).
IMG FreshRSS screenshot showing a variety of feeds categorised as Communities, Distractions, Geeky, YouTube, News, Strangers, etc. Posts from yesterday and today are visible.
Without a feed reader, I can see how I might feel the need to "check the news"
several times a day. Pick up my phone to check the time... glance at the news
while I'm there... you know how to play that game, right?
But with a feed reader, I can treat my different groups of feeds like...
periodicals. The news media I subscribe to get collated in my feed reader and
I can read them once, maybe twice per day, just like a daily newspaper. If an
article remains unread for several days then, unless I say otherwise, it's
configured to be quietly archived.
My current events are less like a firehose (or sewage pipe), and more like a
bottle of (filtered) water.
Categorising my feeds means that I can see what my friends are doing
almost-immediately, but I don't have to be disturbed by anything else unless I
want to be. Try getting that from a siloed social network!
Maybe sometimes I see a new breaking news story... perhaps 12 hours after you
do. Is that such a big deal? In exchange, I get to apply filters of any kind I
like to the news I read, and I get to read it as a "bundle", missing (or not
missing) as much or as little as I like.
On a scale from "healthy media consumption" to "endless doomscrolling", proper
use of a feed reader is way towards the healthy end.
If you stopped using feeds when Google tried to kill them, maybe it's time to
think again. The ecosystem's alive and well, and having a one-stop place where
you can enjoy the parts of the Web that are most-important to you, personally,
in an ad-free, tracker-free, algorithmic-filtering-free space that you can
make your very own... brings a special kind of peace that I can highly
recommend.
LINKS
HTML My de-crappified BBC News feeds
HTML FreshRSS
HTML I love it