Part of me is excited by the (slow, far too slow) trend of people starting to back away from social media and moving to formats that are more under their control, and longer form (hopefully thus with more nuance, and less algorithm-bait).

Part of me then dies when they’re moving to email newsletters instead of blogs. Google’s decision to murder Reader is still reverberating… people don’t even realize what a good RSS reader would do for them. I get my friends’ social media posts, favorite authors’ blog posts, a few birdsite hashtags, some fandom feeds, lots of news feeds, and the youtubers I follow, ALL IN ONE PLACE. FREE FROM THE ALGORITHM.

I suppose newsletters can do some of that, if you’d rather be in your inbox than a feed reader. Not sure that’s quite as versatile, but if that’s your preference as a user, you do you. For me, it’s a bit lacking. With a newsletter, there’s no way I can check a few samples to see if it’s something I’d be interested in, the way I can with a public feed. Once I sign up, I may get the first email that week or it may be months. Or it may be defunct, and the newsletter owner never took the form off of their sites… unlike a blog, I don’t have a timestamp for the most recent post to see whether the author has touched it since 2018.

I guess that’s my final take – newsletters are better than social media, but less useful than RSS (assuming they are for public consumption).