Someone registered for one of my calls, but they never received my emails from Luma. People on our calls talk about legit emails going to spam.

These things aren’t new, they’re the result of a mysterious world of email protocols and servers and spam filters that we don’t control. Not quite as bad as social media of course, but it’s not fool proof.

This is why I’ve been talking about RSS so much; when someone hits publish, it show shows up in your RSS reader. There are no algorithms, no spam filters, no promotions tab; you just get it.

As I wrote in RSS REMOVES WEIGHT FROM YOUR EMAIL INBOX:

So with RSS, we control what comes (into our “inbox”). There are no surprises. The only things that show up are what we add, whereas anyone can email us, and as we all know – it never stops!

Sure, nothing is fool proof, it’s technology after all. But that’s why I’m so big on websites, too. If you haven’t heard from somebody in awhile, you can (hopefully) visit their website and find out what they’re up to.

​Somewhere along the way, we just accepted that anyone can drop anything into our inbox at any time: a sale, a newsletter, a notification, a bill, a stranger with a “quick question.” It all lands in the same place, begging to be dealt with now.

​Well hey, maybe it doesn’t have to be like that!

​We’ll talk through gentle ways to sort incoming email, build filters that quiet the noise, and make the messages that actually matter easier to find.

​We’re not productivity hustling, or trying to hit inbox zero, we’re just trying to find a little more peace in our digital lives.

​Frederick Woodruff is joining us to share the story behind his book “I Love You Jeffrey Dahmer,” and what it took to bring it to release.

​We’ll start with a quick check-in, hear from Frederick, and open the floor for questions about the book, the choices behind it, and the work of finishing and publishing something like this.

​Then we’ll open it up to everyone, widening the conversation from the work of publishing your own book to how that kind of work encircles all our lives and to everything we’re making.

This right here from Emma Orlando is basically how our week Social Media Escape Club calls started:

It didn’t take long for social media to enter the chat because it has a funny way of stealing the show even IRL spaces these days. As the coffee went from warm to tepid, we lost ourselves on the trail of online exhaustion, more specifically the fact that it’s a bullshit metric measuring people’s ability to be in the room and how samey it all feels nowadays.

The exhaustion. The bullshit. The shame of some random niece you know being able to go viral, but you can’t even get 10 people to like a post.

I’m not saying deleting social media is for everyone, but if it hurts, if it’s painful, if it’s making you feel bad – none of those things can be good for your art, your business, your mental well being.

There are recovering musicians who don’t play bars.

As creative, magical, artistic beings we can find other ways to do the work. Are the platforms built by techbros the only way to flourish? I think not!

The quote above hits on something else, too – “the chat.” Talking with other people about the pain is the best way to beat it. Social media loves to isolate us, make us feel like we’d be lost without it. That sounds like “toxic relationship” langauage to me, and I want nothing to do with it.

So keep talking with other people. Keep the conversation going, in person, on the phone, in a Zoom call – whatever you have to do to get the feelings of exhastion and grossness out of your system, and find ways to replace it with better vibes.

This was inevitable: Meta charging for links in a Facebook posts and Instagram Reels.

As Future of Media reports, “without paying for a subscription, pages could come up against a maximum of two Facebook links per month.”

And it seems they’re going after the “link in comments” trick, too.

“The new restrictions being tested include links in comments. Users included in the test have reported that once they hit the limit, their URLs appear as plain, non-clickable text.”

The best time to have left Instagram and Facebook was five years ago. The second best time is now.

(via Pixel Envy)

From August Lamm, author of “You Don’t Need a Smartphone (affiliate link).”

Digital media stimulates us at a level that most routine analog activities cannot match. Once we adjust to this level it becomes difficult to appreciate the subtlety of offline moments.

This is why it’s so hard for me to pick up a book, or play a CD, because of the slowness. From the time I digitized my CDs and was able to switch between songs and albums and genres as fast as I could click, yeah, of course the idea of a five disc CD changer sound terrible, but that’s what we did back in the day!

Why watch one movie when you could scroll through 100 short form videos of just the best scenes?

Watching a movie, listening to a record, playing a video game – those used to be offline pursuits, where we “mono-tasked,” and now it just feels “hard” to sit still long enough to listen to a full CD and read a chapter in a book.

This was inspired from today’s “WHAT IS RSS?” Escape Pod Zoom call (we have another call on Thursday, Oct 8th), talking about how everyone is busy, and receiving so much information every day.

Then, if we start using RSS to read our favorite blogs, newsletters, YouTube channels, etc., well, that’s like a magazine. Remember back in the day you could just pick up the magazine and read it?

That’s different than newsletters that come into your inbox, because face it – our inbox is different. It’s not like a magazine, it’s business. It’s family. It’s bills. It’s notices. It’s receipts. It’s everything.

So with RSS, we control what comes in. There are no surprises. The only things that show up are what we add, whereas anyone can email us, and as we all know – it never stops!

And picking up the magazine today or two weeks from now is usually fine, but we usually can’t take a two week break from our email inbox.

RSS can remove weight from your email inbox.