I love reading blogs
In the last few months my consumption of traditional social media has halved, and the number of blogs I've subscribed to via RSS has probably doubled?
I love it!
It's a much more personal experience to hand-pick who I want to see content from, and your average blog post is undeniably more thought through and considered than a tweet someone wrote and posted within a ten second time window (although, maybe there's a place for spur-of-the-moment thoughts too, somewhere?) They're often about complete, fleshed-out topics or trains of thought, too, which I think is probably much healthier than flitting around been things. And the lack of an algorithm serving me what it thinks I want to see—what it thinks will keep me scrolling as long as possible—is wonderful. Once I finish reading everything I want to, I can close my RSS app and get on with my day. If there are things I haven't got to yet, they stay there until I next open the app, and I'm not bombarded with adverts and promoted posts left, right and centre.
Anyway, it's very inspiring to curate a group of writers that I enjoy reading, and I feel it helping me with my own perception of who I am as a person and what my interests and values are. I don't think I ever got this from Big Social Networks and, instead, felt quite the opposite: I was a blurry, fuzzy mess of thoughts and feelings and didn't have any sense of conviction or direction.
I want to get it on writing and contributing some of my own stuff eventually (especially stuff that isn't meta-blogging about wanting to blog, which is all I've achieved so far). In the meantime, though, I want to finish this post with a (very incomplete) list of people I've enjoyed reading:
👋