Leaving Twitter & How I Replace it with RSS
So as I write this Elon Musk is promising to step down as CEO of Twitter. Sp maybe things will improve but either way Twitter has a much smaller role in my life than it did.
So it was my first thought to replace Twitter with some other kind of social media, namely Mastodon. I realized that I think social media is the problem. I left Facebook years ago, to my friends and family it was me not you. Facebook is an unfair platform not to mention run by an infinitely corrupt company. What do I mean by unfair? When you join Facebook you immediately get inundated by friend requests. Friends and family and other people who think they fall into one of those categories. This leads to expectational debt to friend people you really don’t want to be friends to. There is also an obligation to interact with people you wouldn’t interact with normally. There are many other reasons, but these are a few of mine that are less than obvious.
Why am I leaving Twitter?
There are several reasons to leave Twitter, and to be clear I am not planning on deleting my account but taking a hard break. The easiest way to explain why I’m leaving Twitter is Elon. I’m tired of the toddler like behaviors of the CEO of a social media company. He is not the guy to lead a company like this.
So I had to evaluate what I was getting out of Twitter that I wanted to continue to have access. It came down to two main things:
Sharing my ideas and faith with people
Keeping up with news and a handful of people I enjoy reading
So the product of the first reason is what you are reading write now. I started my blog. The second was to find a way to use RSS to fill that need.
Obviously RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is an old technology to follow websites and blogs and use a reading app to collect those feeds in one place. Many people used Google Reader back in the day, but after Google shut that down the landscape has created a variety of different feed aggregators. I have used a few, most recently Inoreader.
So I started my journey asking a couple of questions: I can get news, but how do I follow Twitter accounts in as RSS feed aggregator. I heard about Feedbin and after looking into it was excited to find out that not only can you subscribe to Twitter profiles but they give you an email address to send email newsletters to and have them mixed in with the rest of your news feeds. This solution has so far been amazing. If any of the Twitter posts have links to articles it pulls the text from the articles and has been awesome to read. I use Reeder on my iPhone, iPad and Mac to read the feeds and its been great.
I’m so happy with this solution so far.