GoKawiilLast week, I updated my blogroll to include everyone in my RSS feed reader. While I read a lot of topical blogs and newsletters, I also follow a goodly number of interesting people I don’t know as well as acquaintances. I didn’t include these personal blogs on my blogroll before, but decided it was time to add them.
(My impetus for updating it was Frank Meeuwsen’s call for folks to share their blogrolls — I started this as a reply, but I’m past 2000 words so…)
After starting the process of pulling my website off of Google, I declared myself all-in on people; expanding my blogroll is part of that process. I used to think of blogrolls as for people I knew IRL, but I’ve come around on it. Hence, my blogroll is full of “Internet strangers.” (It’s still not representative of everyone I follow since I follow a lot of people through micro.blog instead of RSS, but one step at a time.)
This post is my contribution to the November 2023 IndieWeb Blog Carnival, organized by Alex Sirac on the theme of community and belonging.
Changing the focus of my follows
Over the years, I’ve shifted my news consumption away from publications and towards referrals from real people, but it’s not just my sources of news that have shifted: I am trying to give more of my attention to people, not events. To the things that matter in people’s daily lives. I want less of my energy and attention going to “newsworthy” events far removed from my sphere of influence and more to living non-reactively. Instead of gathering information, I’ve changed my selection criteria for which feeds to follow towards connection and sociability.
When I’m not overwhelmed with the emotional onslaught of international and national news presented in ways designed to make us fearful or enraged, it’s easier to hear the everyday concerns of people and see the patterns of life. Personal websites represent a return to human scale.
How I decide who to follow
I follow folks more liberally than I used to on social media, where I felt weird following people who weren’t “creators” of some type. Individually, most people don’t publish that frequently on their personal websites, so I have room in my feed reader for lots of people.
(Sorry people who follow me for the three posts a day 😂)
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