Falling in love with RSS feed

I like long-form reading. I like long-form explanations also. I think that comes from my habit of reading tons of fiction and nonfiction. Last year, I read 37 books. That's why I never felt lazy to read long-form political analyses on Facebook and was able to digest various nuances of naive takes of short-tempered writers. 

The reading habit also helped me keep focused on various trivial and non-trivial things. Also, that is why I never liked short-form videos on various social media platforms. Especially tech videos. The short 1-minute “Explanations” or “Quick takes” generally ignore various nuances of any particular solutions and you don’t get the time to follow the thought process of the content creator/instructor.

I never tried going deep into the world of RSS feeds. I actually thought that RSS feeds became extinct long ago and people only read social media posts. Recently I was reading some articles regarding software engineering and really thought that "I should follow his writings". This brought back the question of RSS feeds. And I am genuinely intrigued by this simple idea of "following a feed".

The next step is to find a proper application to use on my Mac. It needs to be Free. It needs to have a simple interface. It should not be a web application/service. Also needs to be actively maintained. Only one application ticked all the boxes. And it is NetNewsWire.

NetNewsWire is free and open source. Managing RSS feeds is very very simple. A simple sidebar with the sources and another with the latest blogs/feed items. It is native, so it doesn't open another electron and consume gigs of RAM. And it does what it was supposed to do well.

I have been using it for the last couple of weeks and it has led me to unsubscribe from some more newsletters I regularly follow. It is much "healthier" to refresh the feed application than social media. Also, I only consume the report I am interested in. Not something the "Twitter"/"Facebook" algorithm analyzes what I might be interested in.

Does it mean it has helped me to reduce my consumption of social media? In some way, yes. While taking a break from work, I can consume what I "intend" to. The idea is, to take some authority upon my content consumption. I love reading about football, Liverpool, and Tech. And that's what I am reading regularly and more.

However, it is a new experience.