I am tired of the algorithm
I am sick and tired of having 20 different apps on my phone all giving me different notifications about how I need to pay attention to them. Getting a push notification at 8:46 because my phone figured out that I tend to be done with my morning meeting at that time.
Funnily enough, my dad advocated that RSS was the best when I was in highschool. He thought that I would love it but I didn't really understand the point at the time. I wasn't interested in the news so I figured that facebook covered all the bases I needed. At the time I was able to manage my limited number of friends so that I could keep up with every one of them just fine. Not to mention that everything was able to be sorted by new, rather than not sortable at all.
I am returning to old school - RSS. Sure it isn't flashy and is (literally) as old as me but we have strayed too far and my ADHD brain can't take it anymore. I need to simplify.
Use-case
I am terrible at managing all of my feeds. I try to check what my friends are up to on Facebook and Instagram but either I have too many friends (boo) or the algorithms have no idea what I actually want to see. I want to choose what I subscribe to and get it passively.
A friend has a blog? Perfect. I can subscribe to them using RSS.
A friend has an instagram feed? Perfect. I can force that into RSS.
I want news that I care about? Perfect. MPR and Hacker News both have RSS feeds that cover the majority of my interests.
I want to subscribe to YouTube channels without having the algorithm throw me down a rabbit hole? Perfect. I can subscribe to them using RSS.
Self Hosting
Since I have my own server (I'll post about that later) I decided to host my own copy of FreshRSS. Just throwing a slightly modified docker compose on my Unraid server made it a nice quick start to my project. Setup was easy enough even if I do find it annoying that I can't actually sort by publication date natively. I can't wait for this feature to be implemented.
For now, I settled using lire on my iPhone as a reader. I will definitely be moving to FreshRSS as a PWA as soon as we get sorting taken care of. I have found myself using it more than lire when it has been a few days since adding new feeds (time naturally sorts the new posts from incoming feeds).
I am going to add five-filters to this to entrich the feeds but I haven't gotten to that yet. I will definitely be using this dockerized container rather than trying to self host it a different way however.
Finally, I felt like setting up rss-bridge would help to complete the integration. I would definitely appreciate having everything all in one place and to get the benefits of rss integration with the social media feeds I care about. I haven't explored using it much yet but I am excited to see more of what it can do.
Integrations
I found that using this blog, hosted on Ghost, I can set up automatic poisting to Mastodon. I don't have a following on there but I have been looking for a social media that I have the option to self-host. I dislike the analytics that Meta can take from Facebook and Instagram or Elon can take from 'X' I don't want anything to do with those sites except to be able to be reached out to by people from my past. I am on there so I can see what friends and family are up to, but if they want to see what I am up to they can pull up my blog or my feed.
It's nice to have more control over what I am posting and to know that there likely isn't a swarm of bots pushing up arbitrary view counts for ad revenue.
I am far from finishing this project but I am excited by it so far. It has already made my media consumption feel much more limited. (No more doom scrolling on Tik-Tok or Instagram.) However, I do want to consider limiting my subscriptions a lot more. I do run into some problems with Hacker News being posted to very often. As much as I find a lot of the information on there very interesting I wonder if there is another feed that might satisfy my tech news with less overall content. Maybe I will find that it is just the right amount and I am still getting used to this "new" form of media consumption.
Either way, I feel much more on top of what I want to be consuming instead of hoping the algorithm somehow blasts me with things I care about. If I miss something in the future? I will find a feed that supplied what I missed. I don't see any downsides to this method so far. I hope it stays that way!
