Big tech wants to harvest your attention for money, via selling ads in an ad monopoly. If your attention is worth so much, why are you giving it away for free. Get your attention back, and spend it on content that give you lasting enjoyment.
To do this I am using RSS to create my own aggregated feed. No recommendation algorithms, only creators and publications I have personally curated in chronological order. If you don’t know what RSS is check out aboutfeeds.com.
I can control what content I consume, and when I consume it. I don’t get any notifications about new content, it works solely on pull.
Content modes
The aggregated feed allows me to have a workflow where I operate in two modes
Quick mode
This mode is for when I have a little time, or don’t have enough mental energy to engage with anything deep. For example while waiting for the boat. I use these small moments to check my feeds, and save articles or videos for later.
Deep mode
The other mode is when I have a both time and energy to spend. For example when I am on the boat. Then I will go to my list of saved items, and read or watch something. This prevents me from being pulled down a hole of recommendations, and wasting my time on endless feeds of drivel.
This approach helps me read and watch content I actually want to, not what big tech thinks is going to keep me scrolling. It Also encourages me to directly support publications I care about by either donating or subscribing to their paid content.
Tools
For actual tools I use Feedbin for my RSS-reader. What I like about Feedbin is that a lot of other apps and services can use Feedbin as a backend. Feedbin can subscribe to newsletters by making a custom email address, and newsletters show up as normal content (without notifications or a red dot on my email app). It’s not free but the subscription is pretty cheap at 5 USD/month. I’m using the app ReadKit on iOS and the Feedbin web version on PC/Mac.
For saving articles I use Obsidian Web Clipper. This saves the article to my Obsidian vault as markdown. This is useful for reading without distractions, and for referencing articles from other notes. I also use this to create blogposts with weekly recommendations with little effort.
Tips
Where to find feeds
Most news sites have RSS support. The search in Feedbin is a great help here because RSS isn’t typically advertised on most sites.
BlueSky has RSS-support. Paste an URL to a profile URL to your RSS-reader.
YouTube has RSS-support. Add the link to the channel you want to subscribe to your RSS-reader. Tip: Sometimes you have to add the /videos to the URL for YouTube to subscribe you to all videos they post. Like https://www.youtube.com/@ThePrimeTimeagen/videos not https://www.youtube.com/@ThePrimeTimeagen.
RSS-bridge has a lot of RSS-feeds for sites that don’t officially support RSS.
morss.it - Full-text RSS This site gives you full-text RSS for sites that give partial feeds for their articles.
A lot of bloggers will have a blogroll on their site.
Some good feeds to get started with
Sidebar - A daily newsletter of 5 links for “designers and makers”
Hacker newsletter - A weekly hand curated list of interesting articles and links from hacker news.
TLDR - A daily tech newsletter. It also has other newsletters for different themes like web development, DevOps and more.
Feed management
Use tags. Don’t be afraid of tagging a feed with more than one tag. I have a tag for all Video feeds and a tag for each category of video.
Be wary of chatty feeds. Feedbin shows you statistics for each feed of what you can expect. I have a separate tag for chatty feeds so I can ignore them if I don’t feel like it.
Don’t fear the mark as read button. You missed a story? So what. When I get “behind” I go through the blogs and non-chatty feeds I care about and then mark rest as read. Fresh start with inbox zero.