Some All-Trades Jagoff

I was originally going to be more glib about this timeline apps article in the Verge a friend linked me too. I have a visceral, almost primal negative reaction to these apps, and David Pierce's suggestion of my current state of being does the article no favours:

You’re following creators on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, keeping up with your favorite memes on Tumblr and all the news on Bluesky, refreshing your favorite subreddits over and over all day, and checking your favorite news sites a few times, too.

The premise of these apps is that everything on the internet is a feed, and their promise is that you can have access to all these feeds in one place. This is, of course, the promise RSS made. It is also the memory many have of the heyday of RSS. Pierce even pitches these apps along with a plea to truly consider what you add to the apps—to take the retreat from unending algorithmic feeds toward a more curatorial approach. I think this impulse is good! But I think the premise these apps are built on is one we should chafe against and I think the promise of these apps is a trap.

RSS never was everything for me. I didn't have my messenger chats in Google Reader, or my email, or any of the forums I visited on there. I don't think it ever would have dawned on me to even want that. Some of that communication was synchronous and some of that would have been updates I largely didn't care about or wouldn't want to see until I actively went looking. I don't think everything is a feed (or at least it isn't in anything but the most superficial sense), and to treat it that way is to cheapen anything that doesn't fit nicely into that model. Even within my RSS reader I treat different things differently. I skim and mostly ignore my local paper's news stories but I save up Morning Music posts until I have a free afternoon to enjoy a curated experience. It's nice to know when there's something new to look for, but I do wish more places on the internet offered a place to just click around and find cool things like on my friend Casey's site. I consider One Gross Online a pale imitation, but it's page design and feed experience is aimed at making it a place to check out instead of just a feed to consume (whether it's there or not it is a goal to continue to aspire to).

My bigger problem with these types of apps (other than the fact that any of these social media and commercial sites will do their best to crush them if they gain any real purchase), is that a social media site is a place to be (or to avoid :) ). These apps simultaneously let these places run rampant and keep you out of them. The noisiest feeds will drown out the rest and have you reading everything as if it's from there. But also, you will be outside those places. Divorced of their context. It's sort of the other side of the coin from any of the tools that let you spam social media by cross-posting to both Twitter and Mastodon at once or Mastodon and Blue Sky (I've seen like 2 people who seemed to work out how to do this in a way that felt natural and you can flatter yourself to believe I mean you specifically if you were one of the people to do this). Even for slower sites like letterboxd that I unabashedly like, I am excited to see all the movies my friend Liz just added to her watch list. I would be sad if I didn't see that when I went to the site. I would hate it if that showed up in my RSS feed.

What's my thesis here? Tools that do everything rarely do anything well and even the best do it at the expense of some of those things? That places are and should be unique and to fit them into the same place is to strip them of any meaning or character? Sure. Let's pretend I made a full case for that. What does that mean for this posting into the void microblog I wrote this on? I don't know. I think my problems with it are sort of the problems I'm talking about and the answer isn't yet forthcoming to me. Watch this space (or add it to your timeline app so you don't have to)