112. My RSS Renaissance

A nostalgic return to simple content curation

Jul 24, 2023

Social media is having a real rough time these days. Reddit’s front page feels more like the bottom of the barrel with posts from such riveting subreddits like r/doordash_drivers and r/amiugly. X (née Twitter) feels a bit haunted

, and the ensuing fragmentation has been exhausting to keep up with.

This 3-month old screenshot isn’t even up-to-date anymore (src)

On the other hand, I’ve been enjoying the network of newsletters I discovered over the past year through Twitter and my own efforts in the

100-day Creator Challenge

The only problem: my email inbox is my todo list, and I hate having unread newsletters pile up in there. I hesitate to subscribe to newsletters because of this. Instead, I used to bookmark Substacks and check on them when I remembered to. I realized recently how silly this was. This has been a solved problem for decades! So amidst social media chaos and decentralization, I’ve returned to an old-school technology: RSS aggregation.

For those unfamiliar, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a web standard that provides a constantly updating index for articles from your favorite sites. You add each site’s RSS feed to an aggregator, which will monitor for new content, removing the need to manually check them. It’s also a platform-agnostic technology, so you can subscribe to writers on any newsletter platform or those who are self-hosting. From there, you get your very own curated timeline. No algorithms, no hustlegrind listicles, no ads! I don’t even have notifications turned on for the mobile app I’m using.

By changing the container that my newsletters live in, I’ve been reading way more of them. Just like I don’t read every single post on my Twitter feed, I’m at ease with letting things go unread and pass me by outside my inbox.

Ironically, I’m reading way more because I’m okay with not being caught up!

I encourage you to embrace the serenity of RSS yourself. All Substack newsletters should have feeds enabled, e.g. https://kzhai.substack.com/feed. Let me know if I can help you get started!

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057. There‘s never enough time

Kevin Zhai

Feb 18

Before quitting my job, I fantasized that once I quit, I would have all the time in the world to do what I wanted. I would read so many books. I would work out every day. I regret to report on the other side of the sabbatical that there still is not enough time to do everything. Although I’ve certainly read and worked out significantly more than before m…

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2 Comments

gome

Jul 25Liked by Kevin Zhai

I like RSS because it's so simple to produce. I keep a feed for my blog that I can just update manually whenever I write a new post. It's nice that it's a common standard, a) for me as a writer because it lets me support subscription to my blog really simply, and b) for readers because it means there's lots of things they can subscribe to.

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