Curated list of personal blogs

RSS is still popular[ly-supported]. It's not too late.

I felt exactly the way you did for a long time. Eventually, I decided to invest in setting up a more healthy and symmetric relationship with information, like you describe.

I realized RSS was the right tool for this goal. I'd definitely recommend trying this, even if you don't have the gall to self-host. It feels like I get three square meals a day, instead of injecting corn syrup every 15 minutes for 16 hours.

I chose to self-host my reader + data store, so that all of the data can live on my machine, and so I'm not dependent on some VC, advertising, or goodwill-backed project that will kick the can in a few years. There are plenty of good options. I decided to try out miniflux [1] as a first pass because I liked it's dependency graph, and haven't felt the need to try anything else.

Most blogging platforms (blogger, squarespace, wordpress, substack) produce RSS feeds by default. News aggregators like HN and Reddit have robust APIs for generating RSS feeds.

There are products like you describe, that convert a web page into an RSS feed with various hacks. IMO, this creates too big of a dependency on a flaky third-party. It might (literally!) be easier to build+maintain it yourself for the few sites that don't have an RSS feed, with `curl` `echo` and `sed`.

[1]: https://github.com/miniflux/v2

Okay, I'll break the analogy down for you, since you are having a hard time:

Part one: You, me, the writer (any human being)

Part two: Existing in a public space (to be found via Google or or noticed in Twitter or making stuff on Etsy or showing things on Instagram or just being photographed in person)

Part three: Self-expression of any form (writing something that will be found "colonial," or a blog, or making a hand gesture, cracking one's knuckles, or standing there with an uncomfortable smile, or even knitting (https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...) in that public space

Part four: Negative consequence for that self-expression ("cancelled," getting fired, the usual death threats, "screaming, hats first into the wood chipper") from ... people who have never even met you, who found that self-expression in the public space.

Cardinal Richelieu: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

It's the revolutionary spirit of the times. These incidents occur. You may not be aware of them, but others are aware of them, and they have what is known as a chilling effect.

I guess we all have different edge cases to our worldviews!

Is there varied content on micro.blog? The concept is nice (simple social network using RSS) but I’ve been looking at the “discover” page a few times and the content really doesn’t seem interesting, although the vibe is polite and calm.

So, couple things about the Discover page.

First, it's categorized. The platform uses emoji instead of hashtags and the Discover page has a set of defaults, so clicking on the dropdown at the top of the page will give you some other options. You could also try a keyword search to find posts related to topics you're interested in, and then see if you want to follow those people.

That being said, the second thing to know about the Discover page is that it's hand curated, and I'll be the first to admit that there's a pretty clear bias in the kinds of posts that bubble up. :) For example, I follow @adamcomputer (https://micro.blog/adamcomputer), because, as you can probably guess, I'm very much a nerd. But I don't know that I've ever seen any of his stuff land in the Discover feed. So instead, I sometimes find interesting people and look at who they're following and go from there.

Now, I still very much enjoy browsing the Discovery feeds! But I'll be the first to admit discoverability is, at least in my opinion, still a challenge on the service.