i love you, rss
Before this blog, I'd pondered the idea of starting a Patreon or a newsletter of some sort. I liked the idea of doing a semi-regular thought or artdump, and the idea of people wanting to tune into said dumps. But I always hesitated for two reasons.
One was that I didn't do anything on a schedule, and if I did do something regularly, I'd stop as soon as it became a task on my to-do list.1 And two was that I've developed a habit of wanting to escape my audience if I knew it was there β worse if I knew who was in it. The awareness made it difficult for me to write or draw or post freely, always thinking about how it would look and if it was good enough and if the people I knew were watching would be offended.
RSS comes as a relief for the overly self-conscious me. While not knowing who is reading brings about a different sort of paranoia, it's mostly freeing! I get to say what I like and throw it into the void. On occasion, in the form of an email or an ask on my website, the void shouts back β and usually pleasantly. It's always a nice surprise to get a random email from a kind stranger.
It's also not as widely used as email, which is a comfort. I like a smaller audience, and find it freeing to be less accessible to, uh, people I know in real life, lol. I don't think any of my family or friends have an RSS reader β there's no way to tell without asking, and I don't.
I like not knowing who's subscribed. I like that a visitor has the freedom to stay as updated as they like β whether they subscribe to my blog's RSS feed, just check my page when they remember to, or never visit again β without me having to know. I like that friends have this freedom too, and that our relationship isn't affected by their enjoyment of my posts.
...Not that it would be, in the most dramatic interpretation of that sentence, but also, kind of, in a less dramatic sense? On social media, you usually follow your friends even when they don't post things you like or care about, and unfollowing them feels like a bigger deal than it is, because the "follow" is an indication of friendship. You're either following or you're not; you're either friends or you're not. That's why social media has the mute function now: so you can keep the friendship label without seeing their posts. Anyway, I like that there's none of that song and dance with RSS.
I've been speaking of it as someone who posts, but I appreciate it as someone who reads too. There are some days where getting a new notification makes me want to explode. I've deleted emails from newsletters I subscribed to because they were catching me while I was already overstimulated, and when this happens often enough I unsubscribe altogether, but this is the same problem as the unfollowing thing! I worry the person I'm unsubscribing to β if they are a friend βΒ will take that as me disliking them suddenly, when in reality, I just need a break. I might resubscribe again later. Or I might not! Regardless, with RSS, I don't have to worry about that bothering them.
I like that my own RSS reader is just an extension on my desktop web browser, and that it's something I only peruse at my desk instead of the horrid phone that already consumes all my attention. All the feeds I subscribe to are longform blogs, webcomics, or friends' websites. I keep microblogs and other gimmicky, popcorn content to the social media accounts I have, so my RSS reader is something that brings me only peace when I look at it. I love not having a "for you" or "recommended" timeline β everything is something I chose to add to it.
RSS has been around almost as long as I've been alive2, but I only learned how to use it last year. While I still use regular social media feeds to keep up with other things (and to post, ugh), I love the spaces I inhabit that allow me to use this simple, unburdensome tool.