Goodbye Doomscrolling, Hello Again RSS

Old tech is great tech. In this post I enthuse about ditching social media and going back to using RSS for content discovery like in the (g)olden days of the internet 🧓

Reddit and Doomscrolling

The Reddit API debacle has been a bit of a blessing for me. Gone now is a decade-long habit of reaching for my phone in idle moments, opening the Relay for Reddit app, and scrolling through lots of nonsense that deserves absolutely no space in my brain. I’ve spent years knowing far too much about topics I have no interest in at all, because discussions about them just happened to be on the self-styled front page of the internet. The pending demise of my go-to Android app for browsing Reddit gave me the final push I needed to just delete it and free up a lot of headspace.

So now I spend far less time ruminating on things I have no influence over and that have no real impact on my life anyway (hello, American politics!), and I have a lot more time to read things I am interested in. It did leave me in a quandary though - how do I find those things now that I’ve kicked the last of my old social media habits?

RSS, Feedbin, and Newsletters

The answer has been to go back to basics, and I’ve been collecting RSS feeds like in the olden days. On a colleague’s recommendation I subscribed to Feedbin, which allows me to sync feeds across my devices and provides me with a unique email address for newsletters. That second part has been really valuable for me - I’ve switched my various newsletter subscriptions to the address provided by Feedbin, and now they appear in my feed reader instead of cluttering up my inbox. That’s a great bonus; now everything I want to read is in Feedbin, and my email can go back to being about communication instead of content. I never kept on top of all those newsletters anyway!

For paid newsletters the process needed an extra step. I wanted to keep account management emails in my inbox, so a filter that auto-forwards from paid newsletter sources to my Feedbin email address ensures everything works the way I want. I’ve also been using Feedbin’s bookmarklet to send pages and articles to my feed from my browser, keeping as much as possible in one place.

Reader Apps

On Android I used FocusReader for a while, which syncs my feeds via my Feedbin account and has an enormous number of customisation options:

On Linux I checked out NewsFlash, also signed in to Feedbin to sync my feeds, but for the most part for desktop browsing I just visited feedbin.com in the browser. After a while I ditched FocusReader too in favour of Feedbin’s progressive web app, which does the job nicely.

In a future boring post I’ll go on about the other thing I’ve been using my newly-liberated doomscrolling time for - reading more books from my rapidly growing and carefully curated e-book library. How exciting!

This post was updated a couple of times since the original publish date