Cleaning the RSS reader
During my last holiday, I caught up on a lot of reading, especially the articles waiting for me in my RSS reader. I use Reeder, which looks beautiful and is very easy to use. It has a lot of features, but not so many that they distract you. They are more helpful in managing content. It also allows you to subscribe to podcasts and YouTube channels, and categorises accounts from Mastodon, Pixelfed, Bluesky, Micro.blog, Glass, Flickr, Soundcloud, Comic Strip and Reddit.
It was a great feeling to feel ‘up to date’, but at the same time, following the channels I subscribed to did not cause me any pressure. I just did it casually.
I thought I would be able to maintain this habit for longer. Especially after returning from holiday, when I would go back to my daily responsibilities and work, which takes up a lot of my time at various points throughout the day.
I wasn't able to. Not for the first time. But for the first time, I decided to do something about it. To clean up. Effectively enough so that I could control the influx of content coming to me every day.
But I also failed, because it's difficult for me to part with some channels. I had 175 of them. After ‘cleaning up’, I was left with 121. I deleted 54. I think 121 channels is still too many. But my inner sentiment doesn't allow me to clean it up any further.
Although something Jim Mitchell recently wrote on Mastodon comes to mind:
I chose to nuke all of my RSS feeds in NetNewsWire this morning, save one (try to guess which one – it's not one of mine), with the plan of starting fresh. I was marking most feeds as read without even bothering to skim over them. It seemed pointless to keep such noise around.
It's an interesting concept to start everything from scratch. Sometimes it's very liberating. However, I wouldn't want to get rid of all my feeds. I'm going to repeat the clean-up in a while. I'll probably delete more feeds then. But it may also happen that in the meantime I'll add other sites to my reader. It seems like a never-ending battle.
But, maybe one day, I'll delete everything and start like Jim? Who knows.