I feel like the common wisdom is that if seasonal changes are going to affect your mental health, it’s going to be the winter, when temperatures get colder and days get shorter. My experience has often been the opposite, though: It’s not that I don’t sometimes struggle during the winter, but it’s spring and summer that really do a number on my mental health. It’s been helpful to recognize that over the last year or two, not because it changes the pattern but rather because being aware of the pattern is a first step toward developing healthier responses to it.

Over the weekend, I decided to plunge back into following a bunch of social accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky that I had previously removed from Reeder to avoid information overwhelm. Sensitive to the possibility that information overwhelm would come back with all of these new follows, I tried using Reeder’s filter feature to do something I’d never thought about before: organizing feeds by genre instead of by content.

That is, I’ve previously used folders in Reeder (and plenty of other RSS apps) to organize feeds into the different subjects that I’m interested in and then catching up on feeds one subject at a time. However, this time, I used Reeder’s filters to organize by feed type—or genre. That is, I have all true RSS feeds accessible through one filter and all social feeds accessible through another. The idea here is that I’m more interested in at least reviewing all of the true RSS feeds (blogs, news sites, etc.), but with social, I’ll be more willing to hit Reeder’s “go to top” button and skip over a bunch of posts that I missed overnight or during a busy day.

Between purging bookshelves and using the filtering feature of my RSS app, today is a big day for overcoming my tendency toward completionism.

Heading into another phase of following more sources but using Reeder features to keep it manageable. We’ll see how long it lasts before another phase of following fewer sources.

I have ten minutes to rage-write this post before I join a meeting, so it may not be particularly nuanced—though I’d love to revisit these examples in the future. I recently got to listen to Cory Doctorow read the first hour or so of his forthcoming Enshittification, and I was struck by two things in the first couple of minutes. First, by the way that he tied enshittification to platforms, and by the way he loosely defined platforms as intermediaries. I think there’s something important in both of those.

I hate read this article because I was sure RSS wouldn’t be mentioned. It did get a reference at the very end, but that almost feels worse. RSS is hands down the best way of customizing news consumption, and it kills me that we don’t talk about it more.

Spent some time exploring Tapestry last night (and stayed up too late doing so, boo). Really appreciate what it’s going for, but it’s not quite what I want, so going to stick with Reeder.

I don’t remember exactly when I signed up for the beta of Flipboard’s Surf “social web browser”—probably shortly after blogging about it here—but my invite came in, and I finally installed the beta yesterday to give it a look. This isn’t a proper review so much as a few off-the-cuff thoughts based on a few minutes of fiddling around but those thoughts are mixed.

When I first linkblogged about Surf, I said that I wanted to see more apps like this, and trying out the app only reinforces that impression. I think the design of the app is great, and I’m very interested in the way that it seems to work as a client for Mastodon and Bluesky, not just a feed reader that’s Mastodon and Bluesky compatible. The podcast interface looks promising, too, and I just love all of these efforts to break media out of platforms and combine them into single, innovative apps.

For the first time in a few years, I’m sorting feed subscriptions into folders instead of having a “monofeed.” Combined with Reeder’s lack of unread counts, I’m pleasantly surprised how this has encouraged more mindfulness in subscribing and checking feeds.

Reorganizing folders in my RSS/Mastodon/Bluesky client is making me curious about how emoji get alphabetized.

It’s been messy, but pretty sure I’ve finally figured out how to post images to my website (and from there to social media) from my phone.

It’s now been over two years since I ditched Twitter, and I recently made the decision to go ahead and outright delete the account rather than leave it there to ward off imposters. It’s been really interesting to explore the new landscape of social media during this time, and I wanted to put together a post with some of my current thoughts.

I’m on Bluesky now, I guess?

First, I set up a Bluesky account a number of weeks ago, and I’ve been following other Bluesky accounts for a while (first via RSS, now via the Reeder app alongside RSS), but I’ve finally started actually using it since the election, which seems to be sparking some new interest in ditching Twitter. I’m especially happy that Mormon Twitter seems to be re-emerging on Bluesky, since that’s one of the things that I’ve missed the most. I also think a lot of Bluesky features (domain name-based handles, starter packs, better trust and safety features) are neat!

Despite all the Bad Stuff happening right now, what my brain has chosen to get anxious about this morning is how I have my RSS + Micro.blog + Mastodon + Bluesky reader set up.

A while ago, the RSS feeds for my local newspaper stopped working (at least with my feed reader), which caused me some consternation as I tried to decide whether to build a workaround or just give up on the Herald-Leader. I believe in supporting local news, so I’ve wanted to find a technical solution to this, but a lot of the decision making is out of my hands, and I don’t really have time on my hands to build myself the kind of webscraper that would be fun to try out. So, this issue has just kind of lingered for a while.

The RSS feeds for my local newspaper don’t seem to be compatible with my current feed reader, and I’m torn between building myself a web-scrape-to-RSS workaround for the fun of it or just pivoting to another local news source.

RSS forever! I love RSS, I love Cory Doctorow, and I love this post.

RSS feeds for my local newspaper stopped updating nearly 3 weeks ago. Not sure if it’s the website or my app, but it’s making me grumpy.

introduction and history

I’ve experimented for a while with consuming a range of media through an RSS reader. I don’t remember how long I subscribed to Feedbin, but being able to follow both Twitter accounts and email newsletters in the same app as my RSS subscriptions was a real game-changer. Eventually, I jumped ship for NetNewsWire—I don’t remember all the reasons behind the switch, but knowing that I could keep subscribing to Twitter and start following some subreddits was definitely a major factor.

Prominent among my assorted shortcomings as a spouse and parent is a near-total ineptitude in the realm of home maintenance and repair (as evidenced by my previous posts on the subject). So, a few years ago, when our house’s carbon monoxide detector started its dystopian shrieking in the middle of the night to let us know that its battery was low, I blearily woke up, tore it out of the wall, disassembled it until it stopped sounding like something out of 1984, and decided to worry about it in the morning.

My current RSS reader (feeeed for iOS) boasts Fediverse integration. I always figured it was just through grabbing accounts’ RSS feeds, and you can do that, but it turns out if you subscribe to it as a Fediverse account, it works as a quasi-client, with additional data pulled in. Neat!

I have zero personal interest in joining Bluesky, but I’m happy that you can follow accounts via RSS and even happier that whatever bug was stopping my RSS reader from pulling posts has been resolved. Glad to be following some people I haven’t seen since Twitter.

I am one of those people who responds to a lot of work coming my way by ignoring that work and instead trying to think about how to change my routines and workflows. With the summer coming to an end and a new academic year approaching, I’ve been reading productivity books, thinking about the software that I use, and wondering what needs to change.

switching to Habitica

In particular, as I’ve posted over the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about switching habit trackers. I really like Streaks, but there are a couple of things that don’t sit quite right. Besides, to be honest, sometimes just changing things up feels like a breath of fresh air and lets me double down on picking up new habits. After looking into a few different options, I decided to give Habitica another try. I’ve used this gamified habit tracker a couple of times in the past, and besides the gamification gimmick, there are some things about it that I really like.

I’ve tried to scale back my media consumption recently. My RSS client feels empty, and it’s weird not to check social media as much. Every time I think about stepping it back up, though, it just stresses me out.

Although it’s been a real delight to see so many people joining Mastodon over the past few weeks, I’ve found that there’s also a disadvantage that I hadn’t expected: I’m spending a lot more time scrolling through Mastodon these days than I ever have since setting up my Mastodon accounts.

When I began setting up Mastodon accounts and shifting away from Twitter back in April, I felt like I had made a big leap forward in terms of my online consumption. One thing that I’d always struggled with on Twitter was the feeling that I needed to see every single post from every single account. I’d eventually helped with that by consuming Twitter via RSS and narrowing my followed accounts down to the ones that I really, really wanted to follow. By virtue of converting Twitter to RSS, I was still consuming all the posts from those accounts, but it also forced me to only pick those accounts that wouldn’t overwhelm my RSS reader with posts I didn’t really care about.

I broke my site a few days ago without realizing it, so kept remote posting to it. Fixed site this morning, and now thinking about how nice it is that Micro.blog weaves the new posts into the timeline by the original timestamp instead of mass posting them.