Back to RSS
After the recent events at Twitter, I have decided to remove all of my content and stop using the platform. However, I haven’t been able to fully delete my account just yet. Despite this, I still feel a sense of attachment to what Twitter used to represent. It was an integral part of my online experience for over a decade, allowing me to connect with fellow developers and build lasting communities.
Now that I have a strong reason to stop my addiction to Twitter, it’s an excellent opportunity to revisit how I want to consume and share information.
Over the years, I became more careful about how products used my data. I gradually migrated to services focusing on privacy (like Fastmail or DuckDuckGo) and, more recently, local-first applications like LogSeq.
The decentralised social media space is moving a lot with new protocols and services announced. Mastodon is catching most of the attention currently. I started to use it again (my 4th attempt) as more people I followed on Twitter became active there. But I don’t want to settle on it—I want to put my attention and effort into returning to RSS feeds.
RSS is decentralised enough for me—people host their content where ever fits them best, and it gives control over the degree of ownership. All we need is to expose an XML file. The rest is up to us—we can build everything or use services to help us publish. It may not be the most optimal format, especially for discovery. Still, it’s proven and powers the Podcasting industry (although Spotify is trying to kill it by building its walled garden).
I believe it will cover my need to stay up-to-date and learn from other professionals in the Web industry. I have added all my favourite blogs on Inoreader and subscribed to various link aggregators’ newsletters1 with an RSS feed to find new content and get exposure to new things.
I will spend more energy on my website and turn it into a digital garden where I publish a bit of everything that follows what I’m currently interested in. I like how Joel Hooks frames it in his Digital Garden article:
It is a blog, sure, but it is also a wiki. It’s a spot where I can post ideas, snippets, resources, thoughts, collections, and other bits and pieces that I find interesting and useful. Instead of always being a “performance” level of blogging, it can be a looser, more human endeavour that drops the idea of robots sorting the content (in this case, simply by date created) and embraces the idea of curation, by me, for you.
It feels like we are starting a new social media era, and I’m excited to see how things will evolve. In the meantime, I’m back to RSS.