On hyperlink rabbit holes

Social media just makes me, at best, morose while I just scroll for hours through algorithmic brain bait or, at worst, overwhelmed at the scale of The Suck¹ happening on the daily. But I am more overall healthy and stable today than in previous years and have had better ability to pop myself out of it. Donc, I’ve been on a quest for more old style blogs² in an attempt to find a certain kind of thing… again. Not like a “capture my youth” sort of thing but more finding people in a different media create something more about thinking than just attention.

How I do the thing

I am still a staunch lover of RSS having never gotten over the untimely demise of Google Reader and had been hopping through all the things that have tried to replace it. Right now, I mostly use Reeder 5 to aggregate things which, when I first moved to it³, was powered by Feedly but now I have been using it essentially exclusively. Any time I find something even remotely interesting online that seems to have some sort of regular presence, I grab an RSS feed for it and put it in Reeder.

I have a “Trial” folder. Anything I find myself reading regularly graduates to the “Good Ole Blogs” folder and maybe to the “Morning Breakfast” folder that I read over coffee nearly every day.

How do I choose things?

OR logic between these rules but AND means they have a better chance at success…

1. They have to come from sources I like.
2. They have to be actual people⁴.
3. They need to exist outside of X, preferably Mastodon.
4. They need to write on more than 1 topic⁵

Bonus if they think in footnotes.

Sources.

Today’s bounty of new feeds, and what inspired capturing⁶ this came from a bunch of b logs I sudden found at Bear which has a Discover page to find popular or chronological feeds of blogs hosted on its site⁷. I have read through each unique blog on the list today (Apr 14) adn added nearly all of them. There’s a trove of interesting folks waiting there.

I also mine Mastodon and Bluesky (Maybe Threads a little but that is getting enshittified⁸ pretty quickly….) for people writing in the accessibility and design space, plus the occasional Apple thing. I literally go through tags to see what I can find. Or use the following list of people I already follow to look for things they find interesting. That has also shown a number of really neat things.

So what neat things have you found?

I’m glad you asked. In no particular order, here are blogs and specific posts that got me to add these people to Reeder

• Posthuman.blog⁹, specifically this post about Reddit bots that broke my brain: https://posthuman.blog/this-reddit-post-fried-my-brain/
• Megan’s writings, specifically this post about what to share on line. Which.. same. I’m leaning into the “Fuck It, let’s go” mentality: https://magmacranes.bearblog.dev/i-dont-know-how-vulnerable-to-be-online/
• Chuck Wendig, with this post that a resonate with so strongly I’m annoyed I didn’t write it: https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2025/04/09/what-it-feels-like-right-now/
• Waldo Jaquith, on working in the open. Because I also think out loud to.. uh.. inconsistent effect: https://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2025/03/work-open/
• ě because I so viscerally dislike the idea of one big text file per year but absolutely adore how she writes about it and her processes: https://ellanew.com/2025-04-14-obtf-start-here
• Hi, this is Ava with this posit on writing while bored. But also the random poetry app is pretty neat: https://blog.avas.space/damn-phone/

The internet isn’t entirely dead. You can still find some good stuff out there if you Go rabbit chasing.

Footnotes