• kevincox
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    3 years ago

    I use my email client to follow feeds.

    • I use my own service FeedMail to follow feeds and send me email. (Alternatives are available, but obviously my own service fits my needs very well.)
    • Most of my feeds like tech blogs, some news, comics, some project releases get sent to a special address that gets filtered into a folder called “Not Important”. I then read this folder whenever I have downtime.
    • I also subscribe to a lot of channels on YouTube, PeerTube, Odyssee and similar and they go to a folder called “Videos”. I also have a couple newsletters from authors that go to this folder as they contain videos. Similarly I look at this folder whenever I have some time to watch videos.
    • I also have a handful of feeds that go to my inbox like WebMebtions of my blog and Reddit replies. These are the only ones that actually notify me.

    This works for me because I actually look at everything I am subscribed to. I can see that it wouldn’t work as well for stuff that you just skip the new stuff from time-to-time. (Although I guess you can just configure a folder to delete items after a week or month and it would probably be a decent setup.) I like to keep my signal-to-noise ratio high and while I often subscribe to new blogs to try them out, if I see if they are often posting things that aren’t particularly interesting I am quick to hit the unsubscribe button.

    I like email because I have an existing account that is synchronized across all my devices. I can also use powerful filtering if needed (although at the moment I’m not actually doing any filtering here, just category filtering in FeedMail. I also like that I can receive newsletters in the same way which makes it easy to use newsletters if no feed is available. (Although I prefer feeds where available so that they don’t get my email address and they tend to have less tracking.)