This tweet went around:
To which Jason Velazquez says:
I have good news and bad news.
The good news is that websites didn’t go anywhere.
[…] the bad news— we are the ones who vanished, and I suspect what we really miss are the joys of discovery.
There has been a real uptick in I miss the old internet vibes lately. Jason says I miss RSS and Cassidy misses human curation.
I know I sound like an old man when I go on and on about RSS, but really, it’s sitting right there and is apparently what a lot of people miss.
I will admit it’s not immediately easy to jump into. I like my RSS because I’ve spent decades subscribing (and unsubscribing) to feeds of my liking, honing it to my tastes. And if you were to start with a big pile of developer feeds, that might be more my taste than yours and you might get turned off.
So… maybe just start with like 5 sites that do curation of various sorts, and slowly add to it (and don’t be afraid to remove). Recommendations:
- https://buttondown.email/cassidoo/rss
- https://sidebar.io/feed.xml
- https://feeds.kottke.org/main
- https://adactio.com/links/rss
- https://localghost.dev/feed.xml
I have been thinking about this a lot. I’ve been tinkering with some ideas for an RSS search engine. https://search.wirereader.app/
It’s still basically only useful if you know what you’re looking for though. The discovery piece is much more valuable and I think harder to do.
Thank you for this. I’m finally getting back to using an RSS reader and I always forget Kottke for some reason. It’s so much more time consuming to personally curate RSS feeds but everything I’m reading now is so much more interesting than the stuff “the algorithm” pushes my way.
The sidebar.io feed is not working. And I agree with you that in today’s algorithm world, a curated RSS serves as an antidote.
It does look broken to me too, but I actively get new articles in my reader so
I came accross the IndieWeb a few days ago, which took me to adapt my blog to be microformats2 compatible, which remind me about my Mastodon account, so I end up setting up microblog.pub in my domain and following some people took me to a few blogs, and it’s been 4 nights going to sleep at 3 am. It’s been a while since I went down the internet choosing link by link myself <3