RSS ZERO ISN'T THE PATH TO RSS JOY
2023-07-29
FEED OVERLOAD IS REAL
The week before last, Katie shared with me that article from last month, Who
killed Google Reader? I'd read it before so I didn't bother clicking through
again, but we did end up chatting about RSS a bit (You'd be forgiven for
thinking that RSS was my favourite topic, given that so-far-this-year I've
written about improving WordPress's feeds, about mathematical quirks in
FreshRSS, on using XPath scraping as an RSS alternative (twice), and the joy
of getting notified when a vlog channel is ressurected (thanks to RSS). I
swear I have other interests.).
IMG Screenshot: Google Reader Notifier popup advises of "461 unread items".
Katie "abandoned feeds a few years ago" because they were "regularly ending up
with 200+ unread items that felt overwhelming".
Conversely: I think that dropping your feed reader because there's too much to
read is... solving the wrong problem.
IMG A white man with dark hair, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, moves to push over a stack of carboard boxes, each smaller than the one beneath it. From bottom to top, the boxes are labelled: stress, email client, mobile pings, doomscrolling, social media silos... and the very top, very smallest box, which glows with sunbeams emitted from it, reads "rss reader".
Dave Rupert last week wrote about his feed reader's "unread" count having
grown to a mammoth 2,000+ items, and his plan to reduce that.
I think that he, like Katie, might be looking at his reader in a different way
than I do mine.
IMG FreshRSS sidebar, showing 567 unread items (of which 1 are comics, 2 are friends, 186 are communities, 1 are distractions, 278 are geeky, 1 is "me", 57 are youtube, 13 are strangers, 1 is software, 7 are rss club, 29 are podcasts, and 3 are polyamory. A further 107 are marked as favourites. The "friends" and "rss club" categories are showing warning triangles.
RSS IS NOT EMAIL!
I've been in the position that Katie and David describe: of feeling
overwhelmed by the sheer volume of unread items. And I know others have, too.
So let me share something I've learned sooner:
There's nothing special about reaching Inbox Zero in your feed reader.
It's not noble nor enlightened to get to the bottom of your "unread" list.
Your ? feed ? reader ? is ? not ? an ? email ? client. ?
The idea of Inbox Zero as applied to your email inbox is about productivity.
Any message in your email might be something that requires urgent action, and
you won't know until you filter through and categorise .
But your RSS reader doesn't (shouldn't?) be there to add to your to-do list.
Your RSS reader is a list of things you might like to read. In an ideal world,
reaching "RSS Zero" would mean that you've seen everything on the Internet
that you might enjoy. That's not enlightened; that's sad!
IMG Google Reader's "Congratulations, you've reached the End of the Internet." Easter Egg screen, shown when all your feeds are empty.
USE RSS FOR JOY
My RSS reader is a place of joy, never of stress. I've tried to boil down the
principles that makes it so, and here they are:
* Zero is not the target.The numbers are to inspire about how much there is
"out there" for you, not to enumerate how much work need have to do.
* Group your feeds by importance.Your feed reader probably lets you group
(folder, tag...) your feeds, so you can easily check-in on what you care about
and leave other feeds for a rainy day. (If your feed reader doesn't support
any kind of grouping, get a better reader.) This is good.
* Don't read every article.Your feed reader gives you the convenience of
keeping content in one place, but you're not obligated to read every single
one. If something doesn't interest you, mark it as read and move on. No
judgement.
* Keep things for later.Something you want to read, but not now? Find a way to
"save for later" to get it out of your main feed so you. Don't have to scroll
past it every day! Star it or tag it (If your feed reader doesn't support any
kind of marking/favouriting/tagging of articles, get a better reader.) or push
it to your link-saving or note-taking app. I use a link shortener which then
feeds back into my feed reader into a "for later" group!
* Let topical content expire.Have topical/time-dependent feeds (general news
media, some social media etc.)? Have reader "purge" unread articles after a
time. I have my subscription to BBC News headlines expire after 5 days: if
I've taken that long to read a headline, it might as well disappear. (If your
feed reader doesn't support customisable expiry times... well that's not too
unusual, but you might want to consider getting a better reader.)
* Use your feed reader deliberately.You don't need popup notifications (a new
article's probably already up to an hour stale by the time it hits your
reader). We're all already slaves to notifications! Visit your reader when it
suits you. I start and end every day in mine; most days I hit it again a
couple of other times. I don't need a notification: there's always new
content. The reader keeps track of what I've not looked at.
* It's not just about text.Don't limit your feed reader to just text. Podcasts
are nothing more than RSS feeds with attached audio files; you can keep track
in your reader if you like. Most video platforms let you subscribe to a feed
of new videos on a channel or playlist basis, so you can e.g. get notified
about YouTube channel updates without having to fight with The Algorithm.
Features like XPath Scraping in FreshRSS let you subscribe to services that
don't even have feeds: to watch the listings of dogs on local shelter websites
when you're looking to adopt, for example.
* Do your reading in your reader.Your reader respects your preferences: colour
scheme, font size, article ordering, etc. It doesn't nag you with newsletter
signup popups, cookie notices, or ads. Make the most of that. Some RSS feeds
try to disincentivise this by providing only summary content, but a good feed
reader can work around this for you, fetching actual content in the
background. (FreshRSS calls the feature that fetches actual post content from
the resulting page "Article CSS selector on original website", which is a bit
of a mouthful, but you can see what it's doing. If your feed reader doesn't
support fetching full content... well, it's probably not that big a deal, but
it's a good nice-to-have if you're shopping around for a reader, in my
opinion.)
* Use offline time to catch up on your reading.Some of the best readers
support offline mode. I find this fantastic when I'm on an aeroplane, because
I can catch up on all of the interesting articles I'd not had time to yet
while grounded, and my reading will get synchronised when I touch down and
disable flight mode.
* Make your reader work for you.A feed reader is a tool that works for you. If
it's causing you pain, switch to a different tool (There's so much choice in
feed readers, and migrating between them is (usually) very easy, so everybody
can find the best choice for them. Feedly, Inoreader, and The Old Reader are
popular, free, and easy-to-use if you're looking to get started. I prefer a
selfhosted tool so I use the amazing FreshRSS (having migrated from Tiny Tiny
RSS). Here's some more tips on getting started. You might prefer a desktop or
mobile tool, or even something exotic: part of the beauty of RSS feeds is
they're open and interoperable, so if for example you love using Slack, you
can use Slack to push feed updates to you and get almost all the features you
need to do everything in my list, including grouping (using channels) and
saving for later (using Slackbot/"remind me about this"). Slack's a perfectly
acceptable feed reader for some people!), or reconfigure the one you've got.
And if the way you find joy from RSS is different from me, that's fine: this
is a personal tool, and we don't have to have the same answer.
And if you'd like to put those tips in your RSS reader to digest later or at
your own pace, you can: here's an RSS feed containing (only) these RSS tips!
LINKS
HTML Katie's DreamWidth weblog
HTML Who killed Google Reader?, on The Verge
HTML My blog post: Better WordPress RSS Feeds
HTML My blog post: Mathematical Quirks in FreshRSS
DIR My blog post: New Far Side comics in FreshRSS using XPath
DIR My blog post: Far Side Daily Dose comics via XPath in FreshRSS
HTML My blog repost: Satoru Iwata's First Commercial Game Has A Secret, which I discovered thanks to RSS
HTML Dave Rupert's blog
HTML Dave Rupert's blog post: One friend a day
HTML End Of The Internet
HTML My blog post: BBC News... Without The Sport
HTML My blog note: "My @FreshRSS installation is the first, last, and sometimes only place I go on the Internet."
HTML Article explaining how to find the semi-secret URLs of RSS feeds of YouTube channels and playlists
HTML My blog post: XPath Scraping with FreshRSS
HTML My blog post (and associated vlog): Dog; Person, in which I talk about adopting our dog
HTML Feedly
HTML Inoreader
HTML The Old Reader
HTML FreshRSS
HTML Tiny Tiny RSS
HTML AboutFeeds.com, which provides tips on getting started with a feed reader
HTML Slack
HTML (Official/in-house) Slack plugin that adds RSS feed support to Slack
HTML Link to an RSS feed containing (only) these RSS tips