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RSS (and Atom, put down the pitchforks!) is really, really great, and if you aren't using I'd recommend it strongly. Using RSS lets me pile all of my feeds - blogs, aggregators, a handful of Twitter accounts, Youtube subscriptions, podcasts, etc. into one single, /chronological/ feed. No ads, no pretty infinite scrolling, no bullshit - just the content I want, all in one place. It's real nice, and (in my opinion) really worth the time to set it all up.
If you're more technically inclined, I'd recommend using a more flexible feed reader - for me that's elfeed, but if you aren't as keen on Emacs as I, I've heard newsboat might be decent. For the less technically inclined, there are plenty of great feed readers with nice interfaces - but I'll hold off on recommending one as I'm not really familiar enough with them.
If your feed reader supports it, try defaulting to plaintext for entry content - you might need a text-only browser for feeds that don't cram the full content into the entry content. This is the default for elfeed (with eww) and newsboat, but fancier readers might prefer HTML. It looks nicer, but I really believe that plaintext makes for a much less stimulating experience, which is for the best. I realize that I'm writing this on Gemini of all places, so you, dear reader, probably already believe this. But still, it's better.
One of the nice benefits of a more flexible feed reader is being able play Youtube videos with mpv (or maybe some other video player?) directly. Just pass Youtube links straight to mpv and it Just Works(TM). All of the content, none of the distraction. Just pop the channel ID after this:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=
Using elfeed? Let's trim out those annoying Youtube shorts with this:
(setq-default elfeed-search-filter "@1-week-ago -junk")
(add-hook 'elfeed-new-entry-hook
(elfeed-make-tagger :feed-url "youtube\\.com"
:entry-title "#shorts"
:add 'junk))
Did you know that podcasts are actually just RSS feeds? Skip the podcast providers like Apple or Spotify or whoever and subscribe to podcasts directly. You might prefer a dedicated podcast client if you're using a less flexible reader, but more flexible readers can comfortably manage podcasts.
RSS/Atom is a great way to find out about the stuff you care about and dodge the predatory, addictive patterns employed by social media sites to keep you hooked. Give it a try!
last updated: 2022-12-01