Khaled Abou Alfa

The last pieces of the puzzle finally fell into place.

I was following around 280 people on Micro.blog, 200 people on Twitter and 200 odd on Instagram. All three services do an equally poor job of creating an environment for reading. You go to your stream and its a long list of posts from these hundreds of accounts. Nothing really tying them together. Mixed in are @replies. There is no visual cues to help you see when someone has written a long piece, compared to shorter thoughts. Crucially, all services draw you in (whether it serves them, like Twitter and Instagram) or not (as is the case with Micro.blog).

So I decided to unfollow everyone¹.

My thinking is that by resetting everything, I only allow certain people into the circle and in a controlled manner. You get access to my attention in the manner that I want and on my time. The gatekeeper to this attention is Feedbin, which has gotten more powerful over the years. Spending some time to organise what goes into Feedbin will allow me to spend targetted amount of time there. It used to be a daily affair, but I imagine I can likely spend an hour total on a weekend and catch up on what every one is doing (and then engage if that is what I want to do).