RSS

Molly White wrote a fantastic article titled Curate your own newspaper with RSS.

She runs through the rise of email newsletters, Substack, why that's happened with the Facebooks & Twitters Xs of the world deprioritising links to external sites, then how to go about trying out RSS:

I've been heavily using RSS for over a decade, and it's a travesty more people aren't familiar with it. Here's how to join me in the brave new (old) world of RSS.

I've been using it for even longer, but with a hiatus caused by the same thing Molly mentioned - the death of Google Reader, followed by a "well I just get all my articles from Twitter now" phase - but have returned now to RSS. If you weren't using it ten or twenty years ago, it might be very unfamiliar so her post is valuable.

The only two useful things I think I can add:

1. My personal choice of client is the latest version of Reeder. It makes RSS more enjoyable and 'lighter', ditching unread badges everywhere to chronological feeds that just remember where you're at. Per blog, or any other collection you want to make. It also supports other content types but I prefer to consume them other ways mostly.
2. I don't think she mentioned, you can also follow the RSS feed for any Substack. I'm somewhat surprised they do this given their business model, and maybe won't forever, but right now it works great for free sites. For paid stuff no one I'm aware of does this well, except Ben Thompson with Passport.

I'd encourage you to grab a copy of Reeder and try RSS out. It's such a calmer way to consume content that is interesting and useful. I try to avoid the other platforms these days. Sometimes I miss that sense of swimming in the stream of what is happening right now, but the signal to noise ratio is so low. Over time I've found the most interesting people on Twitter or Threads or Bluesky or Linkedin also write their own blogs, giving a richer, more thought through and information dense form of their ideas. More signal, less noise.