#+Title: I Wish I Tried RSS Sooner
#+Author: sinza
#+Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2025 17:07:43 -0400

I've been keeping up with RSS feeds for a few weeks using Elfeed[0],
an RSS and Atom feed reader for Emacs.

You can tell I'm an Emacs user if you're reading the gopher version
because I'm using org syntax rather than Gemtext like usual. I'll
see how I like this publishing process.

I never really felt particularly connected to any sort of Linux
community before. I had watched people on YouTube who focused on
Linux (for the most part, this is an unfortunately; it's obvious why
when you see most of Linux YouTube), and I had read the forums and
wikis when stuff didn't just work. What I /didn't/ do was actually
talk to Linux users. I was passive.

I have felt connection to the retrocomputing community through fedi
and through going to VCFMW and IndyClassic -- the latter of which is
coming up in about a week. I also have talked to many wonderful
folks in the BSD worlds. Special mention going to the NetBSD
community for their enjoyment of me installing that particular OS on
an eeePC. Plenty of nice people in the FreeBSD and OpenBSD worlds as
well. The Emacs community is also great.

However, with RSS feeds, by sprinkling in some Linux feeds, I
suddenly felt the heartbeat of the Linux world. I wasn't just doing
updates whenever I felt like it (read: never), but whenever I see
LWN say that there's a security update for my distro, which is
Debian at the time I'm writing this. It's still passive compared to
talking to the people who enjoy NetBSD, Emacs, or old computers on
Mastodon, but at least now I feel something.

It also feels great to just read the feeds inside of Emacs. If I
need to pull up something, I just use my combination to have EWW
follow the link.

Yes, yet another post from me gushing about Emacs. What can I say?
It's a good environment for me. It even works rather nicely on
NetBSD. I'm actually typing this up on a Thinkpad x220 that happily
runs NetBSD. :-)

[0]: [[https://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/04/]]