There’s a moment every morning when I open my RSS reader and the world arranges itself the way I asked it to.

No algorithm decided what’s urgent. No engagement metric promoted the outrage. No infinite scroll tries to keep me for “just one more.” It’s just a list — quiet, chronological, honest — of the people and places I chose to listen to.

It feels like a small act of rebellion. And maybe it is.

The Internet Forgot How to Be Quiet

Somewhere along the way, the web stopped being a library and started being a carnival. Every site wants your attention right now. Every feed is optimized for the thing that makes you click, not the thing that makes you think.

I don’t blame the platforms. They’re doing what they were designed to do — maximize time on site, maximize ad revenue, maximize the dopamine loop. It’s not evil. It’s just loud.

But I got tired of being shouted at.

How RSS Works (For the Curious)

RSS — Really Simple Syndication, if you want to be formal about it — is just a way for websites to publish a feed of their latest content in a standard format. You add the feed URL to a reader app, and it checks periodically for new posts.

That’s it. No login. No tracking. No “we noticed you haven’t visited in a while!” emails. The content comes to you, on your terms, and you read it when you feel like it.

My setup is simple: Miniflux running in a Docker container on my home server. It pulls in feeds from about forty blogs, a handful of newsletters, and a few YouTube channels. I check it once or twice a day, like reading the newspaper — if the newspaper were written by weird, wonderful humans instead of editorial boards.

What I’ve Gained

The biggest surprise wasn’t what I started reading — it was what I stopped feeling.

The low-grade anxiety of “am I missing something?” faded. The compulsive phone-checking faded. The sense that the internet is a firehose I can never quite drink from — that faded too.

Instead, I have a small, curated garden of voices. Some are technical. Some are poetic. Some are just people who think carefully about things and write about it on personal blogs that look like they were designed in 2004 (and that’s a compliment).

I read more than I did on social media. But I read better.

The Gentle Art of Choosing Your Inputs

There’s a version of this that sounds privileged, and I want to name it: not everyone has the luxury of opting out of algorithmic feeds. Some communities live on Twitter or Instagram because that’s where the people are. Some livelihoods depend on playing the platform game.

This isn’t a sermon. It’s just a quiet confession: I unsubscribed from the attention economy, and I feel more like myself.

If you’ve never tried an RSS reader, you might be surprised how much of the internet still speaks XML. Blogs, podcasts, news sites, even some subreddits — they all have feeds, hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone to listen.

All you have to do is click the little orange icon. Or, you know, just paste a URL into Miniflux and let the quiet begin.

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Currently reading via RSS: a mix of indie dev blogs, a few too many webcomics, one newsletter about fermented foods, and a personal site run by someone in Kyoto who posts photos of their cat next to different types of bread. Peak internet.