It should come as no surprise that I enjoy RSS¹. I have spoken about it in the past, and keep talking about it to friends. I don’t want to stop! It was a big thing back when google reader was around. That was my introduction to it. Before reddit, before stumbleupon, this was how I read things on the net. I did not follow a lot of things. Therefore, the internet had an end. At least, temporarily.

The appeal for reddit, stumbleupon, and the myriad of other social media that followed was that they never finished. There was always another click. Always another source of dopamine. That was what led me to stop using RSS. I love finding new things, and did back then. They were fun, eye-opening, and gave me the feeling of learning. Whether I learned anything, was a different question. If anything, it was a shallow superficial learning. It made you feel like you knew things. But eroded your ability to delve deeply in a topic. Because the little blip of dopamine afforded by the next article came easier than spending hours on a single one. The slow and low, but sustained dopamine versus the erratic jumps between highs and lows. I know what I preferred.

At least for a few years, this was my go to. I stopped using RSS altogether. Social media was my how I got a lot. It was good, I think. But then it became untenable. It is one of the lessons I learn on the regular: “Private companies do not care about the user”. They want to make money. They need to make money. This is not a moral slight on them. They are a symptom of a much larger issue. When we delegate our vital needs to private corporations, we should expect to become the product at one point. When dealing with companies, it used to be understood that “if you are not the customer, then you are the product”. I do not think this holds true anymore. Even if you are a customer, it is likely you are a product ² Just not in the way you think.

But eventually the service suffers. What you were using as a paid member gets ruined in the name of innovation or the free service gets hobbled in an attempt to turn you into a paying member. And you lose time. Every time. Once reddit started fudging about with third party applications, I relearnt this lesson.

I previously had started a mission to retake my time and attention. Thus, I had cut out a majority of social media from my life. In a twist, the thing that drove me to Social media, the endless content, was the exact thing I sought to escape. The changes at reddit, solidified my decisions.

I now host my own instance of Miniflux [^3], an rss reader. And it curates content from around the web for me. And it has an ending point. I can’t spend hours and hours reading. And the type of content is curated by me, and not an algorithm dedicated to keeping me on a site for as long as possible. It makes a difference. It makes the internet much smaller. Which is a good thing. It makes the internet feel less corporate. They are articles, blogs, comics from people who just enjoy something and want to put it out in the world. And Again, though my RSS feeds, I came across a webcomic that said it well ³

I’m small time. I’ve never wanted to promote myself. I’ve never wanted to argue with people on the internet . I’ve never wanted to sue anyone. I want to make my own little thing and put it out in the world and hope that sometimes it means something to somebody else. Without exploiting anyone. And without anyone being exploited.

The comic itself is great. It makes me think about the current state of AI and scraping. I’m not sure how I feel about that part yet. I need to think about it and form an opinion. But I wanted to write this on getting back to small internet. Small time.

Neat stuff from around the web

• Cat and Girl

  I linked this in the footnotes, but it is still worth reading. The comic itself is endearing and long running. And yes, it supports RSS :)

• Home | Test to treat program

  Free virtual care and treatment for COVID-19 and Flu. Worth checking out if you’re 18+ and in US.

• Coda Your all-in-one collaborative workspace.

  It looks like Logseq/ notion/ google docs but superpowered. Embed media, documents, and robots AI. But I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable throwing personal notes or work notes into something that a) lives entirely online, b) has such integrated AI.

• Comics I Loved In 2023 – Ritesh Babu

  Ideas for comics to read in 2024. Journey to the west is one of my favorite stories, so I may pick up The Monkey King mentioned in the article.