via natalie, in reply to me:

I've been surprised how many people I've seen posting about how they're using RSS again. I guess even when talking about "the heyday of RSS" I was assuming that it was mostly more people joining and not using it than people stopping that caused its decline. I for one have been using RSS pretty much daily since the early 00s.

I would say I fall off of daily RSS reading and then hop back on something like 3-4 times a year and have been since Google Reader died in 2013. It didn’t help that most of the people I knew personally stopped blogging (tho I’m also LARGELY guilty of that— I have been in the 3-to-4 posts a year camp on my primary self-hosted blog) and so my RSS feeds are mostly journalism, news, some weird accumulated tumblr pages, the random people I follow but don’t know who HAVE been blogging faithfully all this time, and (as the newsletter rebirth exploded and Feedbin added support for them) all the email newsletters I’m over-subscribed to.

So I’ve been a paid user of Feedbin since something like 2015? I love it, but I also like to do a lot of things in my life and am definitely overcommitted to work and hobbies and family/housekeeping. Things fall by the wayside and as Cohost became a decent way for me to feel “aware” of what was happening online I fell back into one of my periods of less RSS reading.

As Cohost was wrapping up I subscribed to almost every feed I saw people linking to, putting them in a new folder in Feedbin for just them. When I added the feed I put their Cohost username at the end in parentheses, but last night I realized that I wanted to flip it— I put @username at the front and then put all their carefully considered blog titles in parentheses after that. That small change makes me feel a little bit closer to everyone, as silly as it sounds. (I don’t consider this blog to have a “title” per se, btw— I think topposts dot net is fine for now)

PS I’m hoping by the end of the weekend I’ll have working h-entry post embeds like Natalie does!! It’s so cool to see it working at the link at the top of the post and if you haven’t checked out her blog overall you really should!