What happened was, I read an article about Reeder and remembered how much I loved it. You may recall a couple years ago I decided to go solo with Tiny Tiny RSS. And it was mostly fine, just not great.

So I changed things up today. I'm back to using Reeder full time, with iCloud sync, and it really is great.

Except for one thing. Where is everybody?

It's only when you import your ancient OPML file from the olden times that you realize just how many great bloggers there were. And how few still remain. Man, I really miss blogging. I hope independent publishing comes back in fashion some day.

I guess I'm just old.

As a RSS refugee from the olden times, I've used more aggregators than I can possibly remember. Most recently Reeder on top of feedbin and have been pretty happy with that setup for a few years.

But I got a bit bored with all that and wanted to give something else a try. Enter Tiny Tiny RSS.

Open source, self hosted web app with community themes. As long as you have a host and a DB, you point the installer at it, import your OPML file, add the cron job to crawl for updates and then it "just works".

Hey @kapgar, look what I'm reading.

After a month of using it, I've deleted the WordPress Gutenberg plugin.

Editing tools shouldn't get in your way. Editing tools shouldn't make you fight them. Editing tools shouldn't make the process frustrating. Editing tools shouldn't make the process take longer. Editing tools shouldn't make you have to roll the dice on whether that paragraph has the right amount of whitespace under a photo.

But Gutenberg did all those things. And now I'm back to the old familiar intuitive interface. Posting is a breeze and easy and quick. Which makes me happy, albeit temporarily. For I know it's only a matter of time before this is forced in WordPress core. Perhaps by then a lot of the bugs will have been worked out?

There have been some rumblings about Twitter of late.  A lot of discontent with their seeming inability or unwillingness to address the abuse problem.  I myself have found it slightly less fun to use than it was in the beginning.  Partly the reason why I unfollowed all of political Twitter the other week.  Just done with the negativity.

There's been a push to show Twitter a lesson, leave and use something like Mastodon instead?  I get it.  Every few years there's a kerfuffle and the new shiny is touted as the way to go.  I mentioned:

If my timeline is to be believed, people are angry and leaving Twitter this week. It's noble. But I've seen this movie before, and it's called Ello.— Kevin Spencer (@kevin_spencer) August 17, 2018

At the weekend Simon Willison had an idea.

How about if, instead of ditching Twitter for Mastodon, we all start blogging and subscribing to each other's Atom feeds again instead? The original distributed social network could still work pretty well if we actually start using it— Simon Willison (@simonw) August 18, 2018

It's great.  A lot of people are a little put off by the idea of "blogging" in the who has time to write & consume long form posts sense.  But nothing says you have to write long form posts.   Short post-lettes from your blogging software of choice sounds like a great start.