Me, in 2015:
As many of you reading this likely know, I do this all the time. Probably once every two or three months. I delete everything on Twitter and Feedly and start new. It has led me to finding more and more great people, places, and things than just about anything else I’ve done online. I highly recommend it.
I haven’t done this in a long time and so I’m long overdue. And with the new year coming I feel like now is the perfect time to set fire to my follows across all platforms, newsletter subscriptions, and RSS feeds.
So I’ll be spending the next few days deleting everything. And I’m going to keep it all at zero (or thereabouts) until January. Then I’ll begin building again.
👋
✅ Micro.blog (painful, so many good people there. But, I have to be ruthless for this to work)
✅ RSS feeds in NetNewswire are all deleted
@cdevroe I find this… almost terrifying.
✅ Mastodon
@devilgate Try it. I have no doubt you’ll find it incredibly freeing and enlightening. You can, of course, backup all of your subscriptions if you chicken out. :)
✅ Podcasts in PocketCasts. This is a big one. I listen to hours-long podcasts each week. Definitely an idea echo chamber. Glad to refresh this.
✅ Twitter
Can I suggest (or maybe you already did/do) publishing the RSS feeds list from January as you build it up. I have a lot of interest in diversifying the (non Anglosphere) voices in my feeds, would be nice to follow your fresh road of discovery.
I will definitely do that. Thanks for the suggestion.
@cdevroe I am finding this idea strangely compelling. For Twitter I’d only want to drop everyone who isn’t in my ‘Friends and Family’ list, but that should be doable.
RSS though… I posted last year about a blog coming back that hadn’t posted for years, and I saw it because it was still in my feeds.
How far do you go? Podcasts too?
@cdevroe Great idea, I have decided to do the same. There is too much noise coming from most feeds, and they are about nothing interesting. Much better spend time reading books or listening to music.
@cdevroe That takes some courage, I confess I couldn’t do it. Every once in a while I’ll go through the feed list, and Twitter, and delete a few. But this is too radical for me…
@devilgate I am keeping family, of course. And, I’m keeping a log as I go to track progress.
@JacekWislocki 💪
@maique Have a few pints, come back and try again. 😺
@cdevroe I’m afraid it might work the other way 🤣 I’d end up following a few more, and regret it when morning came!
@maique That has happened to be more than once!
@cdevroe I don’t go all the way down to zero, but I did do a big cull of RSS feeds in the summer prior to moving from Inoreader. Needing to filter out stuff is a big sign that it’s time to stop following that site’s posts.
✅ Instagram
✅ Private Instagram Lists
✅ Newsletters
✅ Twitter Lists
✅ Flickr
✅ YouTube