A humminbird feeding itself on a bright orange flower.

#FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns

In the recent Twitter Migration, in addition to trying out Mastodon, I’ve been seeing some people go back to blogs or platforms like Micro.blog, WordPress, Tumblr, WriteFreely (like Mastodon it’s a part of the Fediverse, but built for blogging instead of short posts) and variety of others. They’re looking for a place where they can truly own and share their content, often in healthier and more humane ways. Many are extolling the virtues of posting on their own website so that they own their content to protect against the sort of platform problems many are now seeing and experiencing on the rapidly dying birdsite. I’ve seen a growing number of people in/on several platforms reviving the early Twitter practice of to help people discover new and interesting people to follow.

As a result, while everyone is exploring new platforms and new online spaces for maintaining their identities and communicating, I’m going to suggest something else interesting to shift our online social patterns: Instead of spending time on Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram, or other major social platforms, start practicing by carving out some time to find and follow people’s websites directly with a feed reader or social reader. Then engage with them directly on their own websites. 

I already spend a reasonable amount of time in a variety of readers looking at both longform articles as well as social media posts (status updates, notes, bookmarks, and photos), but starting this Friday, I’m going to practice . Instead of opening up Twitter or Mastodon, I’ll actively and exclusively reach for one of my feed readers to read people’s content and respond to them directly.

As part of the effort, I’ll share people’s sites I follow and enjoy. I’ll also suggest some feed readers to try out along with other related resources. I’ll use the tag/hashtag to encourage the website to website conversation. If you’re interested in the experiment, do come and join me and help to spread the word. 

Currently I’m relying on readers like Inoreader, Micro.blog, and Monocle, but there are a huge variety of feed readers and a nice selection of even more fully featured social readers available.

Just as many people are doing the sometimes difficult but always rewarding emotional labor of helping people migrate from the toxicity of Twitter and its algorithmic feeds, perhaps those of us who have websites and use social readers could help our friends and family either set up their own spaces or onboard them to social readers in this effort? Mastodon’s decentralized nature is an improvement and provides a reasonable replacement for Twitter, but eventually people will realize some of the subtle issues of relying on someone else’s platform just as they’ve seen issues with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or the now defunct Google+. 

Feel like you’ll miss people’s content on traditional social media? There are definitely a variety of ways to follow them in a variety of feed and social readers. Not sure what RSS is? Feel free to ask. Know of some interesting tricks and tools you use to make discovering and subscribing to others’ blogs easier? Share them! Have fantastic resources for discovering or keeping up with others’ websites? Share those too. Not quite sure where to begin? Ask for some help to better own your online identity and presence. 

It may be a slow start, but I think with some care, help, and patience, we can help to shift both our own as well as others’ online social reading and correspondence habits to be kinder, smarter, and more intentional. 

What will you read on ? Who will you recommend following?

Featured photo by Dulcey Lima on Unsplash

Published by

Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

47 thoughts on “#FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns”

  2. content, often in healthier and more humane ways. Many are extolling the virtues of posting on their own website so that they own their content to protect against the sort of platform problems many are now seeing and experiencing on the rapidly dying birdsite. I’ve seen a growing number of people in/on several platforms reviving the early Twitter practice of #FollowFriday to help people discover new and interesting people to follow.
    followfriday

    Reply

  4. As a result, while everyone is exploring new platforms & new online spaces for maintaining their identities and communicating, I’m going to suggest something else interesting to shift our online social patterns: Instead of spending time on Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram, or other major social platforms, start practicing #FeedReaderFriday by carving out some time to find and follow people’s websites directly with a feed reader or social reader. Then engage with them directly on their own websites. 
    feedreaderfriday

    Reply

  6. I already spend a reasonable amount of time in a variety of readers looking at both longform articles as well as social media posts (status updates, notes, bookmarks, and photos), but starting this Friday, I’m going to practice #FeedReaderFriday. Instead of opening up Twitter or Mastodon, I’ll actively and exclusively reach for one of my feed readers to read people’s content and respond to them directly.
    feedreaderfriday

    Reply

  12. Just as many people are doing the sometimes difficult but always rewarding emotional labor of helping people migrate from the toxicity of Twitter and its algorithmic feeds, perhaps those of us who have websites and use social readers could help our friends and family either set up their own spaces or onboard them to social readers in this effort?

    Reply

  13. Mastodon’s decentralized nature is an improvement and provides a reasonable replacement for Twitter, but eventually people will realize some of the subtle issues of relying on someone else’s platform just as they’ve seen issues with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or the now defunct Google+. 

    Reply

  15. Feel like you’ll miss people’s content on traditional social media? There are definitely a variety of ways to follow them in a variety of feed and social readers. Not sure what RSS is? Feel free to ask. Know of some interesting tricks and tools you use to make discovering and subscribing to others’ blogs easier? Share them!

    Reply

  16. Have fantastic resources for discovering or keeping up with others’ websites? Share those too. Not quite sure where to begin? Ask for some help to better own your online identity and presence.  It may be a slow start, but I think with some care, help, and patience, we can help to shift both our own as well as others’ online social reading and correspondence habits to be kinder, smarter, and more intentional. What will you read on #FeedReaderFriday? Who will you recommend following?
    feedreaderfriday

    Reply

  18. @chrisaldrich I agree, it’s all possible, but a lot f work and mental load compared to sticking to Social media (aka Twitter) and having the conversations on Twitter. Besides that, we also have communities where we can have conversations.Maybe we need a new evolution of RSS made for 2022.

    Reply

  21. @chrisaldrich I see. “On the IndieWeb your website is your identity.” That only starts to be a problem. I have two. Which one to use? I rarely touch them nowadays. Most people don’t have websites anymore. So it’s small community compared to Twitter/Mastodon. I think we must reduce friction to the absolute minimum.

    Reply

  23. This is a really nice idea Chris.
    I am currently trying out FeedLand Dave Winer’s new project. This is a feed collector & reader. You can also see what other people are subscribing to.
     

    Syndicated copies:

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  24. This is a really nice idea Chris.
    I am currently trying out FeedLand Dave Winer’s new project. This is a feed collector & reader. You can also see what other people are subscribing to.
     

    Syndicated copies:

    Reply

  29. @chrisaldrich It’s possible to run a personal ActivityPub server. Pleroma and Misskey are even available as Yunohost apps. Why is an approach like webmentions preferable?Of course with the right plugins you can connect it all together, but I do wonder if building around publish/comment diminishes the sense of a shared virtual space. One might say that a single user ActivityPub instance does the same thing, to be fair.I’m not trying to criticize, just thinking “out loud”.

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  31. As an extensive consumer of RSS feeds, I really like this idea, and will do my best to join in. (Prompted by this post, I finally got round to making my Friends of Charles Darwin site’s RSS feed more human-readable/friendly, so people who encounter it on the website receive some sort of explanation of what an RSS feed actually is.)

    My main problem with following the recommendations of this post (which, apart from using the hashtag, I have already been trying to do lately—although not as much as I’d like) is that many of the RSS feeds I follow are about topics of personal interest from non-personal (often Big Media) websites. I filter these links and mention them in newsletters, Facebook pages, occasional blog posts, tweets and (coming soon) toots. But what I’m really missing from the golden days of blogging/RSS are the personal blogs from individuals with interests in specific topics. Finding these is surprisingly difficult (unless the topic in question is blogging, the Fediverse, etc.). I follow a few specialist blogs about the history of science, nature writing, science, etc., but I wish there were more—and that they were easier to find. Perhaps, if this sort of initiative takes off, they will become easier to find, but where are the blogs of yesteryear?

    Reply

  38. The idea

    I’ll share people’s sites I follow and enjoy. I’ll also suggest some feed readers to try out along with other related resources. I’ll use the tag/hashtag #FeedReaderFriday to encourage the website to website conversation. If you’re interested in the experiment, do come and join me and help to spread the word.

    #FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns | Chris Aldrich
    Feed Readers
    Feed readers allow you to ‘follow’ websites something of the same way as you follow accounts on Twitter, mastodon and the like. Feed readers are different in that the feeds they read are, mostly, on the open web. Feed Readers use RSS to pull content from other sites for you to read. If you listen to podcasts in an app you are using a Feed Reader, the app. Podcasts like blog posts are distributed via RSS.
    Chris suggests What is a feed? (a.k.a. RSS) | About Feeds to get started.
    My main feed reader is Inoreader. It has been the one I’ve used most since the demise of Google Reader. It allows me to quickly read or skim a lot of blogs and organise that reading in a variety of ways.
    More recently I’ve been using FeedLand. FeedLand is a development by Dave Winer who has an amazing pedigree in software development, RSS in particular.
    FeedLand is a really interesting product, still under development but ready for use. FeedLand allows you to collate RSS feeds either by adding them yourself or by seeing what feeds other users have added. FeedLand then let’s you to organise, categorise these feeds. FeedLand is a feed reader, so you can read the feeds you follow. FeedLand allow you to publish readers for other folk to read in a few different ways. Here is one hosted on FeedLand and one on my raspberry pi. Both are experiments at the moment. Finally FeedLand allows you to produce a simple feed. Of your own. Here is mine viewed on FeedLand.
    Folk to follow
    So a couple of people I find it interesting to follow via RSS

    the dailywebthing linkport one of Joe Jennet’s suite of sharing sites, three links a day. A huge variety of interesting sites. Not so much a gold mine as a gold, silver, bronze, and rock mine. RSS FEED
    CogDogBlog RSS FEED Alan blogs about education, open, WordPress & Flickr amongs other things. Great detail with a personal touch. I think I’ve been reading him for as long as I’ve been blogging. A wonderful blog.

    I am going to try and post for the next couple of Fridays with a wee bit about readers I use and a couple of suggestions for follows.

    Reply

  39. The idea
    #FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns | Chris Aldrich
    Back around 2005 I was learning to blog with my class and exploring blogging. I was on a train with Ewan Mcintosh going to a conference or training event. Ewan was using NetNewWire and showed me how he used it. I’d already got the app, probably from a Mac magazine cover disk, but not really understood it. Watching Ewan read, take notes & blog, everything clicked. I do not think there have been many days since I’ve not used RSS.
    Feed Readers
    Micro.blog if a interesting product. Part blogging service part network. To me micro.blog’s superpower is that the community is open to anyone with an RSS feed. I don’t host with micro.blog but send in a category of my blog which becomes a first class member of the community. Using the app I can read other micro bloggers, some hosted with micro.blog some elsewhere. I can also add any RSS feed to micro.blog so I can follow them without leaving the app. I don’t do this often but it is handy. The app is not my main feed reader but a handy additional tool. Micro.blog is also one of the nicest online communities I’ve come across. Manton has carefully designed it to avoid some the problems of other networks, no follower accounts or favourites. Micro.blog has a lot more than this brief note covers. Manton also wrote the Indie Microblogging book. You can read the whole thing online.
    Folk to follow
    So a couple of groups I find it interesting to follow via RSS
    Caught by the River | RSS Feed

    Caught by the River is an arts/nature/culture clash … an online meeting place for pursuits of a distinctly non-digital variety — walking, fishing, looking, thinking, birdsong and beer, adventure and poetry; life’s small pleasures, in all their many flavours — it was, and still is, about stepping out of daily routines to re-engage with nature. Finding new rhythms. Being.

    Open Culture | RSS Feed Hard to describe, at the top of the page today: A List of 1,065 Medieval Dog Names: Nosewise, Garlik, Havegoodday & More. The best free cultural & educational media on the web
    This post is part of a series with a wee bit about readers and a couple of suggestions of feeds to follow.
    #FeedReaderFriday 1#FeedReaderFriday 2#FeedReaderFriday 3

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  40. Sorry, late to getting to this piece Chris, as I get to my feeds in my own time. I have long lived a feed first existence. Even when engaging with Twitter, I have been consuming via my feed reader. I just realised that I can also produce a feed for Mastodon too using Granary.io. I sometimes feel like I am late to the conversation, however on the flip side I feel that the conversation is more in hand. I feel that if it is worth having then waiting is fine.

    Reply

  42. The idea
    #FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns | Chris Aldrich
    Feed Readers
    Just after I discover RSS in the “flowering” of theScotEduBlogs community I got interested in aggregating RSS and creating specialised readers. Back in around 2006 I was blogging some ideas which lead to Robert Jones & Pete Liddle creating the first iteration of the ScotEduBlogs aggregation. Later I moved the site to WordPress using the FeedWordPress plug-in. I’d seen this in use on the marvellous DS106 site which aggregates blogs of students and open participants of the many iterations of the notorious Digital Storytelling course. The flow on DS106 has pulled in 91749 (at time of writing) posts since 2010.
    ScotEduBlogs is at a bit of a low at the moment, there are not so many folk blogging about education in Scotland. I still love the idea of ‘specialist’ or community aggregations or feed readers. Of course the site has an RSS feed that can be subscribed to. Dave Winer’s FeedLand, which I noted in a previous #FeedReaderFriday, can also create ‘News Products’ with similar results.
    Folk to Follow
    I like to follow some human aggregators, even better if they add their own opinions. One of my favourites in Arron Davis his Read Write Collect blog is an IndieWeb style collector of replies, bookmarks and other responses. RSS.
    Some of Tom Woodward’s Bionic Teaching – utan blixt consists of his harvest of links with brief comment. This might be auto posted, perhaps from pinboard? He also posts about higher ed use of technology and, of particular interest to me, his work with WordPress. RSS
    This post is part of a series with a wee bit about readers and a couple of suggestions of feeds to follow.
    #FeedReaderFriday 1#FeedReaderFriday 2#FeedReaderFriday 3

    Reply

  43. The idea
    #FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns | Chris Aldrich
    Folk to Follow
    Chris Aldrich, who started #FeedReaderFriday has a great feed, but I also follow his hypothes.is stream Feed. I don’t use hypothes.is myself, and the number of items in the feed would be overwhelming if you tried to keep up, but it contains many nuggets that you would not find elsewhere.
    Not a person but tinywords: haiku & other small poems has an RSS Feed
    Feed Reader Tip
    Ignore the unread count. Some feed readers show you the number of unread items. forget FOMO and ignore items, feeds and the whole thing if you have something else to do.
    This post is part of a series with a wee bit about readers and a couple of suggestions of feeds to follow.
    #FeedReaderFriday 1#FeedReaderFriday 2#FeedReaderFriday 3#FeedReaderFriday 4

    Reply

  44. The idea
    #FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns | Chris Aldrich
    Feed Readers
    Another sort of RSS reader is a Podcatcher. Podcast listening apps depend on RSS. My favourite on my phone, I listen to podcasts while commuting, is Castro.
    Folk to Follow
    RSS Feeds this week:

    Eat This Podcast RSS Feed Great podcast on food in all of its aspects.
    Backlisted RSS Feed. Quite in depth reviews and discussions of books, one per episode. Took me a while to figure out the feed for this one. Almost grumpy enough to skip it.
    Scotland Outdoors RSS Feed A lot of BBC radio content is available via RSS. They push their own sounds app, but the RSS is on the page.
    Is It Rolling, Bob? Talking Dylan RSS Feed. Found at random, enjoyed that way too.
    Really Specific Stories. narratives of tech-podcast fandom, featuring producers and their listeners. Fascinating RSS Feed

    #FeedReaderFriday 1#FeedReaderFriday 2#FeedReaderFriday 3#FeedReaderFriday 4#FeedReaderFriday 5

    Reply

  47. I’m going to practice #FeedReaderFriday. Instead of opening up Twitter or Mastodon, I’ll actively and exclusively reach for one of my feed readers to read people’s content and respond to them directly.

    I do this part of #FeedReaderFriday everyday.

    ✴️ Also on Micro.blog

    const conversationLink = document.querySelector(‘.conversation-on-mb’);
    const currentPageURLEncoded = encodeURIComponent(‘https://monkeyhill.llc/2023/08/15/i-do-feedreaderfriday.html’);

    fetch(‘https://micro.blog/conversation.js?format=jsonfeed&url=’ + currentPageURLEncoded)
    .then(response => response.json())
    .then(conversation => {
    conversationLink.setAttribute(‘href’, conversation.home_page_url);
    conversationLink.innerText = ‘✴️ Conversation on Micro.blog’;
    conversationLink.classList.remove(‘conversation-on-mb-fallback’);
    })
    .catch((error) => {

    });

    Reply

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