Today, I stumbled upon Moly White’s Curate your own newspaper with RSS:

Curate your own newspaper with RSS citationneeded.news

To the readers of this blog, there’s nothing really new here. RSS is how we have been reading our articles for a very long time. This is true ( maybe especially true) for social media; I can see if there’s anything worth logging in for on Reddit before I expose my eyeballs to pesky ads. By the way, I just learned Bluesky offers RSS too, as they should.

However, reading this article and thinking more about how I read stuff made me realize that my current state of content consumption is chaotic.

I mostly read RSS feeds on my Android, because I just happen to have it nearby whenever I’m not on the computer doing something. It’s easy to grab when I need to use the bathroom or before I go to sleep. I know I’m going to read mostly interesting things because, as Moly says, it’s my own newspaper. But I also read RSS feeds on Emacs using Elfeed, and the feeds I have there are not the same as I have on Feeder. Meanwhile, I have another database in Feedly on my iPhone, which I use less, but still.

Having different feeds on different devices is problematic enough, but there’s another somewhat related issue.

Micro.blog, where I host my blog, is a special social network and a collection of blog-related tools on top of being a place to host this website. One of those useful tools I use all the time is the platform’s “read it later” tool, which they call “Bookmarks.” Saved articles in Bookmarks are stripped of ads and annoying pop-ups for comfortable reading (similar to “reader mode” in other browsers). They are also stored automatically in the cloud, so I can get back to them much later, even years later, and it would still be there with the relevant images and everything. Though different from RSS, there’s yet more content I want to read. If RSS is the newspaper, Micro.blog’s Bookmarks are the drawers of my desk, containing clips from all kinds of news outlets, blogs, even stuff like manuals for home appliances when I’m too lazy to put them in org-mode.

My content consumption is literally all over the place(s).

This morning I was looking into some solutions in the form of an RSS server which will work well with Elfeed in Emacs. The reason integration with Emacs is important (besides the obvious answer, “duh, it’s Emacs”) is that this is also where I write my posts. Ideally, I could follow up on everything I read from inside Emacs, find my comments about it, and write a draft. And guess what! I just found out that Micro.blog offers an RSS private feed to each user’s Bookmarks page. I shouldn’t be surprised when it comes to Micro.blog, RSS is king¹.

Having my devices “talk” to each other and figure out which articles I read and from where would be great, especially since I don’t necessarily have all my feeds in one place. For example, I follow Hacker News only on my iPhone, and my Android’s Feeder contains a few gems from Kagi’s small web RSS feed which I don’t have in Elfeed yet. I just need to figure out how to start organizing this mess.

Footnotes

Footnotes

¹ : not directly related, but on the topic of RSS: Micro.blog allows you to integrate RSS feeds directly into your blog, which in my opinion is one of its killer features. I mentioned it before, but my Movies and Games categories, where I rate both, are not even written on this blog; these are posts from my letterboxd and backlogged accounts, which integrate into the blog and look like my posts.