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
       
 (HTM) Katie's DreamWidth weblog
 (HTM) Who killed Google Reader?, on The Verge
 (HTM) My blog post: Better WordPress RSS Feeds
 (HTM) 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
 (HTM) My blog repost: Satoru Iwata's First Commercial Game Has A Secret, which I discovered thanks to RSS
 (HTM) Dave Rupert's blog
 (HTM) Dave Rupert's blog post: One friend a day
 (HTM) End Of The Internet
 (HTM) My blog post: BBC News... Without The Sport
 (HTM) My blog note: "My @FreshRSS installation is the first, last, and sometimes only place I go on the Internet."
 (HTM) Article explaining how to find the semi-secret URLs of RSS feeds of YouTube channels and playlists
 (HTM) My blog post: XPath Scraping with FreshRSS
 (HTM) My blog post (and associated vlog): Dog; Person, in which I talk about adopting our dog
 (HTM) Feedly
 (HTM) Inoreader
 (HTM) The Old Reader
 (HTM) FreshRSS
 (HTM) Tiny Tiny RSS
 (HTM) AboutFeeds.com, which provides tips on getting started with a feed reader
 (HTM) Slack
 (HTM) (Official/in-house) Slack plugin that adds RSS feed support to Slack
 (HTM) Link to an RSS feed containing (only) these RSS tips