i've been thinking a lot recently about the sheer amount of noise that goes on both inside and outside of my head. everything is so fucking loud, all the goddamn time. i'm starting to think all those inspirational authors have a point when they write their million billion fucking articles about how everyone wants to steal your time (themselves included)
one of the frustrating things about being diagnosed for adhd is knowing not only how annoying it can be to get a script but also to actually push the boulder towards getting one. so, in the midst of not knowing how the fuck to get myself to do something, i spend my time scrolling shit like twitter and youtube shorts until i'm motivated by feeling like ass. i find most of my productivity these days is the minimum effort possible to undo my own self-inflicted brain damage. in the sisyphean battle against myself, i once again fight not with the logical (but difficult) social solution that is rewiring my brain but with a technological band-aid that gives me the room to breathe.
so, I've been getting really into rss lately.
how the fuck do you even get started on that? answer: jump in. find a reader you like, find feeds you like. step one, the reader. i was looking for a really simple way to keep myself from clicking through websites and algorithms and filling my brain with slop. i set out with pretty simple criteria:
- it's gotta feel nice,
- it's gotta look nice.
- i don't want ads,
- it's gotta sync, and
- i want to see exactly what i signed up for and nothing else.
(bonus points go to anything that i won't need an active subscription.)
i spun the wheel and picked a random app that looked promising. in my case, i went with lire. yes, it's a bit of a strange commitment not to simply demo a few more free apps to see how i like them before pulling the trigger on a paid option. i can suffer a one-time 10 dollar hole in my wallet if it meets the criteria and slows my scrolling of pointless shit that makes me sad. i would have searched for foss alternatives, but this was for ios. lire offered me a dead simple and native interface that had exactly what i wanted. i've been using it for a week, and i've gotta say--it's pretty nice.
ultimately it was the draw of pulling all the text content of an article or feed into an app drew me in. i got a taste of how annoying it can be when i tried to use the native inoreader reader, just to discover that a fuck ton of feeds offer you about 3 sentences before a "click to read more" link. if i'm reading on my phone, i don't wanna have to deal with app switching like that. i'm using inoreader as my backend for syncing and accessing my feed on desktop, but i probably will switch to a self-hosted option like miniflux at some point in the future.
ok, app found. cool. it's empty. time for part 2, content.
since i don't really know what to put in right away and dropping in any large news source would instantly explode my shriveled walnut brain, i gotta start small, with the things that i'm trying to replace.
youtube was easy as hell, every channel already has its own rss feed. it's always gonna follow the format of https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<id>, which i'm honestly surprised they haven't deleted yet (knock on wood, please dear god). if i can't just find it by namesearching under "add feed" then grabbing the link takes zero time at all.
i went through my old youtube subscriptions and picked out my top 5 or 6 most actively watched channels (shoutouts izzzyzzz and strangeaeons if you like deep dives into very niche internet culture, two of my all-time favorites on the platform). if i wasn't caught up on a channel, i left it behind. i didn't see a point in trying to migrate anything that would just add to the noise i was already trying to escape.
podcasts were another easy one. they're already just rss feeds. lire doesn't seem to play the audio files which was a little disappointing, but i could let it slide since that's not what i wanted to use it for. i have my silly little horror podcasts on my phone already, i just wanted to track when there's an update.
then there's... anything else. webcomics, news feeds, blogs (this one included!), pretty much whatever, as long as it offers a funny little xml file that updates every so often. i'm basically rebuilding how i interface with the internet from the ground up, which is scary but also fun and exciting. it's a whole new discovery process which feels somewhere between tedious and a breath of fresh air, but i think i'll stick with it and see where it takes me.
anyways, thanks for listening to my ted talk.
happy halloween!!
ah fuck we're haunted again