The state of the web these days is abysmally loud and divisive. Every day it bombards our fragile minds with absurd and horrible things, but there is a lot of constructive content available. The algorithms that power social media emotionally prompt us to ignore the positive things and consume the garbage instead. To clear our minds and calm our lives, we must eliminate them.
RSS is no secretand its roots go back to the last millennium (I love saying that). Before social media warped our minds with some of the strangest content ever created, people got their news straight from the horse’s mouth. And why wouldn’t they? If you liked someone, you followed them (like on social media). But the problem begins and ends with the middleman: the organizations that shape your content feed on who knows what forms of black magic.
At some point, YouTube stopped promoting the channels I was interested in and instead pushed content it wanted me to consume, like videos about people eating an inhuman amount of food or how chatbots are sentient and try to get out of the matrix. It was ridiculous and I felt the need to cut out the noise. So it was necessary to remember a simpler time again, and I did it with a 40-year-old text editor.
Emacs and RSS
Two technologies as old as the hills
Many websites publish their content in HTML and RSS formats. The latter is a lighter document consumed by RSS readers. The main selling point is not a personalized reader but aggregation. Before social media, RSS readers combined content from many sources into a single feed, which is much easier to control.
Emacs is a decades-old text editor that’s exclusively for the nerdiest of nerds. The barrier to entry is knowledge of Elisp, an obscure programming language that’s too nerdy even for developers. I don’t expect to convert you, but Emacs has some cool features that I want to share.
The first and most fundamental thing I can’t live without is a keyboard-centric workflow. for a programmer nerd like meI need the maximum efficiency at my disposal. I have hundreds (if not thousands) of commands to remember, so I want to send them to the same part of my brain responsible for breathing. That way, if I forget them, I’m probably dead anyway.
Second, fuzzy search. That’s a fancy way of saying that I press my keyboard and the closest match appears in real time. It may seem irrelevant, but typos and forgetfulness are a burden when running commands many times a day.
I use an Emacs package, elfeed, which automatically tags incoming news. Using a long string of tags, I can filter feeds by category and then save them with a useful name for easy remembering. For example, I save the tags “+privacy +linux +yt” under the name “Linux privacy videos on YouTube”. To reactivate that filter, I lazily type a close approximation of the name. This allows me to quickly switch between dozens of categories in less than a second.
I also have a “read later” feature, which is a custom “+bookmark” tag. Daily, I scan my content feed for constructive content and save it for later. Whether entertaining or informative, I always have a library of interesting things to work with, all carefully labeled for easy searching. Plus, I can save them as to-dos in notes related to the project I’m working on and gradually create an educational roadmap as I go. I can’t tell you how valuable that is, because finding great content from the start isn’t easy.
Emacs probably isn’t for you, but that’s okay. RSS is what matters here and there is a suitable client for everyone.
Maximum control and better privacy
RSS provides only the content you have chosen to consume and nothing more. Social media gives you the illusion of that choice, but a highly refined AI-powered algorithm carefully selects the content it would prefer you interact with. These platforms use all the tricks Bible (#ad) to keep you hooked and they exploit the weaknesses of human behavior to do so. Emotionally charged content is one such trick and they spare no thought about the widespread consequences. RSS is simple and much more direct and peaceful, without anger or divisive issues; just wholesome information from people who aren’t trying to ruin my day or sell me AI.
Following is abundant on social media, but RSS (on its own) does not have it. Privacy is a huge concern for me, so I need to search for content the same way the ancients did, when the web belonged to its users.
People may not realize that they can consume some social media content (such as YouTube and Mastodon) via RSS. I used the RSS Feed URL Finder web extension to get the feed URL of the YouTube channels I’m interested in. I also use BlockTube.which further limits my exposure to hazardous materials.
Apps just for you
You don’t need to use Emacs
Emacs is not for everyone; in fact, it is almost for no one. But RSS is a long-standing web technology and there is a huge list of available clients. Most look and work like an email app, so you’ll probably feel right at home.
For websites that do not publish RSS, many have attempted to solve this problem with custom services and programs to transform web page content into RSS format. Some solutions cost money and others are free local programs; RSS.app is one example, but there are many more. You point them to the web page you want and they often retrieve it and transform it into RSS for the reader to consume.
7/10
- Brand
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lenovo
- Operating system
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windows 11
- UPC
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Intel Core™ Ultra 7 258V
- GPU
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Intel Arc 140V Graphics (integrated)
Try Emacs. Or not! It’s your choice
My RSS needs may not match yours. Often people just want a familiar interface, while I love fast textual searches. You’ll probably want to stick with a standard RSS client or perhaps a feed service with a much richer feature set.
For me, RSS is about convenience and security. Convenience because I have everything in one place; security because I safeguard the information I consume. I want the things that inform my decision-making and opinions to be under my control; I think that’s one of the most pressing problems in today’s digital world and I take it seriously.
