Break from Twitter

The last couple of weeks I've been on a self-imposed Twitter hiatus, and I may end up not coming back.

Instead of consuming my Twitter stream, I've turned to only read posts from RSS feeds, a mix of primarily personal blogs and tech-news sites.

To enable the transition I purchased Reeder 2 for Mac and iOS, and signed up for Feedly.

Reeder 2 is the unequivocally best feed reader I’ve ever used, it’s very fast, easy to use and has a lot of great features. I use Feedly as a fast backend for syncing subscriptions and read-state across devices.

With this set up, I can semlesly switch between reading on my phone and the laptop, without having to look at the same post twice.

I put together a personal list of RSS feeds based on sources I already knew about, or had followed on Twitter. I did try to include feeds from the blogs of people I follow on Twitter, but unfortunately there isn’t any easy way to compile such a list. (Someone please make such a service!)

So far, the experience has been vastly superior to reading Twitter. There are more quality posts in my RSS stream, and less superfluous remarks on the topic de jour. Also, I’ve not been tempted to instantly share my opinion, like I felt inclined to do for stuff I read on Twitter. This way of consuming content has caused me to reflect more on the stuff I read.