Over the past couple of years, I have almost entirely moved off of social media. For me, social media had two main problems. It began to feel less human. Posts from my friends started to get buried by AI slop, advertisements, and random promoted posts - none of which I had any interest in. When a photo from a friend finally did surface, it was often several months old. I sometimes miss the days of casually seeing what people are up to, but the solution to this has been to get the numbers/contact info of the friends that I want to keep in touch with and make a conscious effort to text or call them every now and then. It does take more effort to reach out, but I generally find this leads to more meaningful interactions and quality relationships.

• My second problem with social media is with the content recommendation systems backing these large social media platforms. Content recommendation algorithms are optimized to siphon away as much of your attention as possible. Unfortunately for all of us, attention is a finite, scarce resource. There are a limited number of decisions that we can make in a given day, and constant stimulation overloads our decision-making capacity. The long term effect of this that I’ve noticed in myself is a shift from analytical reasoning to habitual decision-making. After several hours of “doom scrolling”, I’d find myself making choices that were quick or familiar, even if they weren’t optimal.

Choosing the information to expose to your brain is as basic a right as choosing what to eat or what clothes to wear. In a free country, most people take the latter two for granted, but they wouldn’t even consider the possibility that maybe they can have complete control over what they see on their phones.

Every object, every being,
is a jar full of delight.
Be a connoisseur,
and taste with caution.
- Rumi, The Many Wines

The Many Wines, by Rumi, is a Sufi poem cautioning others on the perils of pleasure. He compares the world’s pleasures to “thousands of wines, that can take of our minds.” The message is not to completely cut off all desire, but to reduce our interactions with the world to only the things that bring positivity to our lives.

I’m trying to take connoisseur-ship more seriously. I could just restrict my internet usage entirely, but then I would be giving up so much utility and enjoyment. I get a lot out of the vast library of educational content on platforms like YouTube. I’ve picked up some of my favorite hobbies like homelabbing, rock climbing, and gardening, by watching videos and reading about them online. It’s true that I could have discovered them through other means, but having readily available information makes trying new things so much more accessible. All that said, restriction doesn’t seem like the solution. Ultimately, I want a system optimized for quality rather than quantity. I want the ability to curate a selection content that’s intellectually stimulating and brings me joy.

RSS

RSS is the central pillar of my content curation strategy. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is awe feed that allows websites to share updates in a standardized format. By subscribing to a feed, you can keep track of many different sites using a single news aggregator. My aggregator of choice is FreshRSS, which conventiently allows me to synchronize my feeds across multiple devices when run on my VPS. It’s also a feed reader itself, coming with a pretty nice web interface. On mobile, I prefer NetNewsWire, available on IOS and Android clients. NetNewsWire is great because I can just give it the Google Reader API provided by FreshRSS, and it will instantly synch all feeds to my phone.

Outline

• Why?
• Attention is a finite, scarce resource
• I don’t consider “simple” algorithms like link aggregators (HN, Lobsters) to be a problem for me. It’s all text-based and based on a simple voting system, which feels a bit more human.
• Taking back control of my attention
• What I use
• FreshRSS for syncing across devices
• On my iPhone:
• NetNewsWire app, sync the OPAML from my server
• Open all links (including yt videos!) in a firefox focus tab
• The great thing about this is that I have it setup to be signed out and with blocked cookies, so the recommendations are completely unappealing.
• PC
• I use newsboat as an RSS reader
• Firefox extension to block yt recommendations

Technical Details

I use this setup in my docker compose file:

# FreshRSS
  freshrss:
    image: freshrss/freshrss:latest
    container_name: porto_rss
    restart: always
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=America/Chicago
    volumes:
      - freshrss:/var/www/freshrss/data
    networks:
      - net

reshrss google reader url added to NetNewsWire: feed.nshan651.duckdns.org/api/greader.php