Social media used to be a great source of interesting things. Twitter in particular: just follow a bunch of interesting people and you’re almost guaranteed to see good stuff whenever you open it. I no longer understand this desire to follow and lament the worst people in the world, though I used to do that too.
But obviously all the social media sites are having an existential meltdown1. I feel like I’ve been pretty resilient to the awfulness, but even so I’m using them all less and less. In fact, for the last few months I’ve found my most used app to be my trusty RSS reader.
RSS still works surprisingly well. It’s obviously never going to have a comeback: it’s just too hard to explain. And most websites don’t advertise their feeds any more. But the feeds are still there. Even Substack has them: x.substack.com/feed will do it2.
Years ago I tried a bunch of readers, and settled on Newsblur. It’s really good. The iOS app is solid and well designed. I regularly sit on the Tube scrolling through a day of posts, and it’s impressively frictionless. It just works. There’s a free tier, but the $36/year is worth it.
- Twitter: too many right-wing lunatics and scummy adverts
Bluesky: too many left-wing lunatics; somehow more depressing
Facebook: I don’t even mind the adverts – it’s the whatever-the-hell-everything-else-is. Still the only place to actually catch up with friends.
TikTok: too much unpleasantness for me
Instagram: spending the weekend converting itself into TikTok
LinkedIn: hahaha ↩︎ - I’ve yet to find a magical all-your-subscriptions feed, sadly ↩︎