The world of feeds – with feedle
No matter how many different social networks will launch from now on, how popular they will become, RSS will always be my favorite way to consume news, post, articles, and especially discover the fun, weird, and insightful internet corners of creative minds. Browsing through my ever-growing collection of RSS feeds within Readwise Reader, feels like goldmine of knowledge. I also embrace the information overload happening within my RSS reader since I managed to filter through the noise for myself by leveraging personal curation, to make sure whenever I read something it is tailored at my interests.
I follow a similar approach for my podcast queue. Whenever I stumble across an episode that sounds interesting to me, I immediately add it to my queue. So, when I want to listen to a podcast, I always have a packed backlog of stuff that interests me.
Maintaining such an RSS setup feels way more efficient that social media. The reasons for that are pretty simple and straightforward: with RSS, once you subscribe to a feed you get the content you are interested in delivered to you rather than scrolling through loads of potential junk you probably do not care about. In recent years, most social networks have constantly changed their algorithms, for the worse, so chances were high that you were missing out on relevant posts. In contrary to that, RSS is way more reliable, since you can be sure to always get the content you are subscribed to, although there is the chance that the creator of the blog suddenly decides to post something completely different compared to what you actually subscribed for. In that case though, you simply unsubscribe, and move on.
Anyway, RSS is a great way to keep up with your favorite website and blogs, while you are avoiding all the noise and clutter from social media at the same time.
Sometimes, I do like to explore, research, and discover even more hidden gems from independent creators. However, it is tedious to use traditional search engines for that, since that kind of content I am looking for is usually burdened underneath a huge piece of junk. I already discovered a couple of lovely personal blogs through folks I have been following on social media. Another way to find new blogs to add to your RSS setup is by reading and exploring the ones you are already subscribed to, since it is pretty common that independent creators link to and share the work of other creators. But what if you want to search for independently created content based on a specific category or search term?
This is where feedle comes in handy.
Feedle is a search engine for blogs and podcasts, that gives you the possibility to search across millions of blog posts and podcast episodes from independent creators. Every search is an RSS feed, which means you can subscribe and stay up-to-date when a new result matches your criteria. And besides that, it is an awesome way to discover content creators you may have not know about, all from a single RSS feed, that is based on your interests.
For every RSS feed that gets indexed by feedle, the content becomes searchable, which means people can find precisely the posts they are interested in. So, no matter if you want to learn more about writing online, product design, SwiftUI, or anything else, feedle will provide you with a lovely suggestion of content, and a great way to discover your next favorite creator. And in case you want to have a constant stream of new posts about a specific topic, category, or search term, you can subscribe to that search via RSS too.
But those are not the only ways to discover new creators with feedle. In case you feel adventurous, you can open a random search page in feedle. After using that feature for a couple of times, it gave me the impression that it uses very high-level search terms only like tech, amazon, java, microsoft, google, iphone, and so on. But still, a nice little feature to explore and discover.
Besides that, feedle features a page called Top Stories, on which they created a collection of thought-provoking writing from the blogs and podcasts they have in their index, discovered and curated by their in-house AI tools (they linked to a site which is unfortunately not reachable, so I can not provide you with more information regarding those in-house AI tools). In addition to the Top Stories collection, feedle provides three more collections: Digital Crossroads (a mishmash of updates, deep dives, and quirky insights from across the digital realm), Good News (a dedicated feed championing solutions-oriented journalism), and Hacker News Front Page (a selection of articles that hit the front page of Hacker News).
In case you want to submit your blog or podcast to feedle, there is a dedicated tab to do so on their website.
Feedle is a great way to streamline the discovery process of new blogs. Whenever I stumble across an interesting blog post after performing a search, I find myself in the lovely process of heading to the author's website, learn more about the author, explore more posts, and sometimes click on a bunch of links and get lost along the way, a good kind of getting lost, getting lost in the indie web. There is so much to discover, so much to learn, and so much to read.
If you have a personal blog to which you publish your notes, ideas, thoughts, discoveries, learnings, make sure to head over to feedle and submit it, so it can get indexed and discovered by more people.
Services like feedle are essential to find content within the IndieWeb, far away from all the noise and junk that gets amplified through traditional search engines and social networks.
Till next time! 👋
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