Escape the algorithm with RSS

How to unplug

I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.

A couple of months ago I started my journey to get off social media, at least as much as possible. I removed the last-standing social apps that I had: Instagram, to “keep up” with my friends, and TikTok, to “keep up” with the news, and kept some like YouTube, Reddit, etc.

This seemed hard at the start, and I had recurring thoughts about how disconnected from my social circle and “THE NEWS” I was becoming. But surprisingly, it got easier quickly, and I think this is not because I am not interested in my friends or the accounts that I followed on TikTok, but because of how unpleasant I felt when using these apps.

For me, it is not only how the UI nowadays is at least 10 times more addictive than before or how many more ads we now have everywhere. The main problem, and the reason it was unpleasant, is how little control I had over what I was seeing while using the app.

The apps got completely algorithm-centric, and everything is made to take you away from the plan that you had when opening the app to get you back into the algorithm. You already know what I am talking about.

A world of illusion

Instagram was an easy one. I uninstalled the app and did not have any cravings again. I am already in contact with my close friends and family via messaging apps, and when I used it, the majority of the time I was simply doomscrolling accounts of other people that I do not care about as much. The only problem was when friends sent me some links, or I wanted to check the profile of some artist to look for tour dates or any other interesting topics. In those cases, I used the browser version, and that sometimes got me back into Insta stories or doomscrolling.

The solution that I found for that was to add a blocking rule in uBlock Origin for the web version, so every time I open a link from instagram.com I get a screen with the message “uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading” and “Go back” and “Proceed” buttons. This way at least I get a big warning to remind me of the dangers of Instagram before diving in.

TikTok was harder to get out of. My brain got too addicted to having small dopamine spikes during the day while feeling up to date with current geopolitical affairs and tech news.

“How am I supposed to live my life without knowing what crazy thing Donald Trump said 2 hours ago?!”

So in the end, of course, the solution was simply not using the app. I uninstalled it and stuck with the demons I already knew: YouTube, Reddit, and HN.

The problem is that YouTube is falling into the same basket of addictive, algorithmic apps. I want to keep it because I can still find high-quality content there, but there is also a lot of content there nowadays that is made to release quick dopamine hits.

This was dangerous because I would use it in the same way that I was using TikTok.

Reddit can sometimes have the same effect when doomscrolling comments, and some of the tech communities that I follow can get too dramatic/toxic sometimes, so I just use it to do some research about specific topics.

The way I use Hacker News is not that bad, given that I just check the “Top Stories” page in search of some tech- and software-related news, and normally I don’t get too interested in the comment section if it’s not something that I am specifically interested in.

So I decided to keep those three apps as “alternatives” to the addictive TikTok, but with some rules.

• YouTube: Love some content there, but it’s getting more dangerous every day to use their UI. I added a 1 h/day time limit and deleted it from my home screen.
• Reddit: Doomscrollable UI, but in my case I just deleted it from my phone home page and found that I do not use it as much anymore, just when doing web research about topics. No need for limitation rules.
• Hacker News: This is still on my phone home screen, can easily check it for 30 m a day and forget about it. The UI is really simple and not addictive at all.

But still, I felt that I did not have as much control of the content that I consume as I would like to; for sure there should be a better way.

The choosen one

I used RSS in the past, but it never stuck with me. I also did not love many of the big reader apps that people recommended online, like Inoreader.

This time I got interested in RSS again because I was searching for a way to subscribe to multiple sources in one feed and thought that I needed to create my own app because I did not find something similar.

But, of course, I was reinventing the wheel, given that this already existed-it’s RSS! As my mother-in-law would say, I had a Milky Way moment¹.

The only feature that I was missing was a way to sync all my RSS sources across different RSS reader apps, like, for example, FeedFlow or Newsboat.

Of course, this also already existed, and it’s one of the main reasons I got back into RSS. It is called Miniflux.

Basically, it’s a self-hosted server where you can create multiple accounts to store RSS feeds, and those feed sources can be consumed by multiple RSS reader apps via an integration.

You can also be perfectly happy simply using the default Miniflux UI, as it is simple and performant.

Miniflux is designed to use as few resources as possible. You can run an instance on a Pi Zero or a NAS with no downtime at all.

For now, I decided to use a PikaPod instance for the small price of $10/year + $5 for daily backups. In the near future, I might get a NAS and run it there, with some other self-hosted solutions like Immich, but this is for another day, and in that case, it will get free fast.

There Is No Spoon

The sensible thing to do now is to ask: what do I gain from running this Miniflux instance or with any form of RSS in general? Yeah, it’s techy and cool, but does it really make a difference?

And the response to that is simple: control.

Now when I see some blog post, podcast, or YouTube channel that I like, I simply add it to my Miniflux instance, so every time any of those sources adds new content, I will be updated in a minimal feed of my choice that only shows what I want it to show. And of course, I would like to get lost in the YouTube algorithm once in a while to find new interesting topics, but it will be willingly and not when I just want to check an update of my favorite channel.

And given that it is all on a Miniflux server, I can have multiple devices, with the apps that I like the most for each device, without having to export, import, and share my data with any venture capital company like Feedly or Google with Google Reader.

You own your feed, you own what you consume, and more importantly, you control the way that you consume it. I hope it has been a useful quick read.

Footnotes

1. A Milky Way moment is a term used by my girlfriend and my mother-in-law to describe when you have a revelation about the meaning or the etymology of some word or phrase that you used for a while. Once you have the Milky Way moment, it now makes sense and you can’t unsee it. A good example would be Ray-Ban; it’s not the last name of the brand founder but just the wording used to describe glasses that ban rays. ↩