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Thoughts on feeds.
I have been struggling with my feeds recently. Both RSS and fedi. I lose enthusiasm for a person because I’m only interested in one of the topics they write about. Eventually I don’t bother searching through the feeds for the good stuff. Then eventually my feed reader app is just not exciting to me anymore. I’d really like better curation tools so I could construct a better experience for myself. There seems to be a culture that posting a unified stream of your thoughts during the day is useful to people who are interested in you as a person, but that’s not the way real life works.
2023-06-02 · 7 weeks ago · 👍 PikaSonic
When I hang with my techie friends we talk tech. When I’m with my family we talk about family stuff. If people are going to talk into the faceless void, I think they need to create different online places for different interests. So to me, it seems like pretty much any tool that supports feeds should plan on supporting multiple feeds per person. Since it’s easy to create multiple accounts, the missing piece would be discoverability and association of feeds together with an author.
I totally agree! While the fediverse does help with filters and lists it would be nice if there was a way to be a more granular way to follow topics using hashtags that someone uses.
I get where you're coming from. When I'm adding stuff to my RSS reader or comitium feed I often waffle on whether I want to add a particular blog/gemlog. If at least 50% of the posts aren't interesting to me then it usually doesn't get added. That's not a knock on the authors, I just don't want to add a bunch of noise to my feed. We all have particular interests and when I want to sit down and read something I don't want to have to sift through the noise to find the things that I find interesting
I can relate and wrote about those feelings last year while moving to Mastodon: "[…] the short version is, that a general feed for everything, which makes up a person, will inevitably lead to oversharing and Twitter-like altercations."
I didn't get around to find some monothematic Mastodon instances, because I'm wary of Social Media, but I'm thinking about restructuring my capsule, gemlog, and the web versions of those to create monothematic feeds. Not quite sure, though.
— michaelnordmeyer.com/gemlog/2022-11-11-moving-from-twitter-to-mastodon-on-the-fediverse.gmi
2023-06-03 · 7 weeks ago
Ha, I have a bunch of RSS subscriptions to follow news sources, but for several years I've found myself skimming headlines and often just marking all as read. There's still enough signal-to-noise to make it worthwhile, though.
If authors would categorize and judiciously tag their posts it would make things easier for the readers, but that is probably too much to ask for...
@michaelnordmeyer Organizing everything by topic might be right for you, but not everyone. It depends on what you have to say, and how you want to say it. When you are talking 1-on-1 to a human you have structure built-in to the interaction. You know what they like, you know if they are a stranger. When you’re talking to everyone at once you have to impose some structure. My tech thoughts might work better as a series of short essays. My family updates might be better as a feed of tiny updates in something that supports pictures easily. Thinking about your relationship with the world at large requires mindfulness, intention and foresight. Things which might be in short supply in the modern world.
Now that I think of it, one could be more mindful about the feeds they follow by skimming the headlines and saving the links in a Reading List of some kind. I could see myself having a list of stuff to read in an app like Obsidian so I could link directly to the things I find interesting.
@PikaSonic That is typically what I do with my feeds. I rarely actually read an article in my feed reader. I skim the titles and sometimes a little bit of the article itself and if it is something I would like to read it gets added to wallabag and synced to my ereader for reading. I also have a smaller selection of feeds I consider the most interesting that I sync to my PDA.
I think there is a subtle difference between writing a post and then choosing appropriate tags for that post, versus having an idea, choosing one of your existing channels, and then writing the post with that channel in mind. Possibly still with additional tags. I like the word “channel” for that idea. A pre-arranged committed path for content in a certain topic.
2023-06-04 · 7 weeks ago