Corporate social media is designed to keep you on corporate social media. Their algorithms are not your friend.
One good way to liberate yourself from their force-feeding is to get an RSS reader. This is an ancient tool of the free internet — a way of subscribing to the stuff you want to read rather than relying on the agenda set by corporate algorithms.
Google used to provide an excellent RSS reader, back when Google also provided excellent search results. They eventually realized that people who used Google Reader were using it to visit websites and to read “content” that didn’t always display advertising sold by Google. So they killed it.
Fortunately, there are still plenty of other, terrific RSS readers out there. If you share Google’s concern about these tools not making more money for Google, then you may want to avoid these. But if making more money for Google — and Meta, and X — is not the primary goal of your time on the internet, then you may find that using an RSS is a wonderful, glorious, liberating thing.
I’m not entirely sure how RSS works, but one great thing about it is that it works even for those of us who don’t really know how it works. One of the things “RSS” is short for is “Really Simple Syndication” and, in practice, it is really simple. You paste the URL of a blog or a publication or any other website into your RSS reader, it locates that site’s “feed” and you click subscribe. Then the reader collects every new post on that site and gives you a list of New Things You Said You Wanted To Read, all day, every day.
Mine looks something like this:
I use Inoreader, which — like most of the good RSS readers out there — gives me the option of displaying the new posts in my feed in different ways. So if I want to see a bit more about each item, I can also choose to display them like this:
I can also organize them into folders by topic or however I choose and read just the posts/articles/entries on those topics. Or I can click on individual feeds and just read everything from that particular site. It’s pretty cool.
It’s also far, far easier than just bookmarking new sites as I discover them and then trying to remember to go back to check those sites later. The RSS reader remembers that for me, and bookmarks them for me, and goes back and checks for me.
I use the free version of Inoreader, which limits the number of feeds I can subscribe to. I’m not sure what that limit is because I haven’t hit it yet, and I subscribe to a lot of feeds. Because I am an old blogger — because I am both a blogger and old — most of my feed comes from blogs. Yes, those blogs still exist and, yes, they’re still just as awesome as they were before corporate social media tried (and failed) to choke them all out of existence back around 2012 or so.
But it’s not just blogs. I also subscribe to a host of news sites, humor sites, substacks, tumblrs, news alerts, and publications of various stripes.
Anyway, rather than telling you about the many kinds of different sites, let me show you. I’m going to do these five at a time, in no particular order.
• AZspot
Naum describes this as his: “Tumblelog about politics, computers, technology, radio, Arizona, science, justice, war, world affairs, globalization, economics, games, design, sports, history, comics, psychology, philosophy, religion and any other interesting tidbits.”
And who is Naum? No idea, really, other than that he’s a curious (in the laudatory sense) guy who probably lives in Arizona and who reads a lot of stuff from all over, posting the interesting bits on his tumblr. And there are usually a lot of interesting bits.
This is the substack of David Dark. I’ve known David since the 1990s and have heard him asking questions for so long that some of those persistent, unsettling, liberating questions now live in my head. There are so many ways to love God and reading David’s writing helps me remember that and to find new ways to do it.
I suppose this video from the band Thrice provides a good introduction to David for those unfamiliar with him:
And did you notice David’s site is a substack? The New Blogspots — the subscription-model “newsletter” sites premised on the idea that people prefer to read blog posts in email — have RSS feeds. So if, like me, you regard email as homework and would prefer to keep up with such newsletters in a way that doesn’t involve your inbox, you can do that with almost any of them.
• Google news alert: “Satanic.”
Google still allows you to create and follow news alerts, even if they don’t make it as easy as they used to (because, again, such alerts tend to send you to sites not directly profiting Google). I set up my alert for “Satanic” more than a decade ago, mostly as a way of finding stories about “Satanic baby-killers” — they’re everywhere doncha know.
Years ago I wrote about “Things I have learned due to my Google news alert for the word ‘Satanic.’” That includes far more than the particular reasons I first set up that alert, including the ongoing hijinks of the pranksters at the Satanic Temple and, thus, an excellent gauge of the current state of church/state shenanigans here in America. It is a sad, sad thing to realize that someone concerned about preserving the First Amendment ant the separation of church and state is better off following a news alert for “satanic” than any news alert for “Baptist.” Sigh.
This is a new journalism site from North Carolina aiming to create “new models for state level news.” If you live in that state or are particularly interested in North Carolina politics, then you absolutely need to be following/subscribing to The Assembly.
I do not live in North Carolina, nor do I have an especially keen outsider’s interest in the state’s politics, but I still find The Assembly a rich and essential read. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate — after reading this site for a year or so, I now do have an especially keen outsider’s interest. The reporting here is so good and the feature writing is exceptional. That whole thing about how the particular is universal and vice versa? It’s that. Local coverage this good is informative and insightful even for those of us who aren’t local.
I previously wrote about The Assembly with some links to a bunch of terrific stories here. That was back in August, so there’s at least that many new terrific stories added since then.
Adam Kotsko has been blogging — with a rolling roster of excellent guest posters — for more than 20 years. He’s a long-form blogger who writes big, meaty essays on deep, academic stuff. Sometimes that deep stuff is academic to me (in the less-affirmative sense), sometimes it’s not — or maybe sometimes I’m not deep to it, or whatever. Like, I may not fully grasp everything in a post about what we can learn from Agamben’s ironic misrepresentation of the Katechōn, but even then I’m glad it’s there, even if I skim posts like that one instead of devouring them the way I do his thoughts on topics like these: “We must imagine Veronica Mars happy: On reboot culture.” (Or like this one, from marika rose: “The Devil in Miss Parton,” which is about a very wide-ranging collection of pop cultural storytelling.)
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In