December 27, 2024 at 11:39PM

I spent some time recently setting up an RSS reader app on my phone, which I really should have done ages ago. Besides news and classic blogging, what prompted me to do this was the discovery that both Bluesky and Substack support RSS feeds.

Substack is its own kind of problematic, but a lot of people whose thoughts I’d like to read currently publish there (and I am a paid subscriber for a few of them despite my reservations). Bluesky seems less problematic so far, but after the Twitter debacle I’m not about to give my heart to another social media company.

But RSS? That’s where it’s at! I can read what’s being broadcast free to the world in an app on my phone without having to put myself into someone else’s membership ecosystem!

I don’t think anyone has really figured out how to be an ethical user of the web, and every day I feel like this thing that I’ve built my career on might also be destroying society. But this feels like a tiny little way to maintain some ethical distance.