Starting over with RSS, one feed at a time

This past July 1st marked thirteen years since Google Reader shut down. As such, there were a lot of people on the fediverse lamenting its loss. Inspired by them, I decided to give Miniflux (a self-hosted feed reader) another go.

Last year I was already hosting my own instance, but I eventually stopped checking it because keeping up with the pile of unread posts started to feel like a chore. At some point the database even got corrupted and I didn’t notice for three months. That’s how much I stopped caring.

This time I’m starting small, with twenty slow feeds. I also followed the excellent advice of Harsh Shadilya on how to make the feed feel less overwhelming.

It’s been running for a week now, and now that I’m being more mindful about what to add, I’ve noticed something. While I’m stating the obvious here, it lets me decide how I want to follow people.

I’ve stumbled upon creators whose work I want to follow, but not necessarily through social media. Social media is the firehose of never-ending content, and that’s fine, that’s what it’s there for. But that doesn’t mean I want to subscribe every single person’s firehose. When those same people have a blog or a personal site with a RSS feed — something quieter, with more refined thoughts — I don’t ponder too much about adding them to the feed.