#freshrss

I want to take a moment to talk about our social media project, Medienfeed (media feed)—curated and run by the conceptioner Ariane and me! Links to our Medienfeed channels are further down ⬇️

Medienfeed started as an idea during my graphic design studies at DIPLOMA University: a way to always stay up-to-date on what’s being written, published, and created in Germany in media and design—especially by other professionals.

It all began with FreshRSS and a handful of RSS feeds I had collected from scripts and lectures. Today, FreshRSS is still at the heart of Medienfeed, but it’s evolved into a service that publishes content on social media as its “frontend.” What started as just two social media accounts has now grown to five channels.

So what does curating Medienfeed actually look like? Ariane and I manage all the source feeds in the RSS backend. We check if a site fits our content focus and first place it in a kind of “kiddy pool” (FreshRSS waiting list and archive) to make sure the feed works technically—or to tweak it if needed.

Once a feed is ready, we move it into its proper internal category, joining the 100+ sources we now track—mostly from German-language sites.

We post three articles a day to the public Medienfeed channels, Monday through Sunday, no breaks.

Check the list below for all five channels: Threads, Bluesky, TwitterX, Mastodon, and Facebook. There’s something for everyone—follow along and stay informed!

Terry Godier’s fantastic article last week introduced us to the term ‘phantom obligation’ and reiterated something I’ve been saying for years: that ‘RSS zero’, unlike ‘inbox zero’, is not an admirable goal. And that reminded me to share with you how I personally make my FreshRSS installation feel more like a tool that serves me, not the other way around.

A little history about our FreshRSS-powered info service

It started out as a simple project during my graphic design studies: I wanted to collect all the websites about design that I came across in my study material. At first it was nothing more than a list of links.

Then I discovered a neat piece of software called FreshRSS. It could aggregate multiple RSS feeds, let you log in, organize things—basically, all the good stuff. So I went through my list, added every site that had an RSS feed, and set it up on a VPS under its own domain. You basically create your own news feed.

That was the version most people knew and used—and I was thrilled that it actually became useful for others. But then things happened: servers failed, the VPS was destroyed, and that version of the service had to come to an end.

Months later, after reminiscing about how cool it had been, my partner had a simple but brilliant idea: keep FreshRSS as the backend, but use social media accounts as the frontend. So we went to work.

Here’s how it works now: we favorite an article in FreshRSS → that article appears in a favorites feed → that feed is posted automatically to social media, one article at a time.

After waiting for more than a month to iron things out, we christened the project MedienFeed (“media feed” in German). We rebranded the accounts, improved the setup, and expanded the scope, because it’s not just about graphic design anymore, but also the many neighboring fields it overlaps with. Moving from grafikfeed or grafikdesignfeed to a unified product called MedienFeed just felt right.

And here’s the best part: It works. It runs. It exists. No more tuning. No more anxiety. Just a solid little service that does what it’s supposed to. A project not abandoned, but finished.

You can check it out here:

MedienFeed on Bluesky

MedienFeed on Threads

Even today, we spent a few more hours refining our research and information tool we call Grafikdesignfeed (I have written about it here before), to cover some more topics and to improve our custom search queries with filters as well.

On the topic of filters: I usually do not have any blocks in place on any social media website (i.e. usually I do not block people/accounts), but I am under the impression that, should I want to use social media as a research tool in the future (looking for what people do and say about certain topics), then I should start using filters there as well.

Because I want to do that.

Also, I am adding more books I want to read in 2025 from my Bücherregal page on my website to my Goodreads “Want to Read” list as well, which I originally started out doing, but then some ideas for our FreshRSS service came up… you know how it is: it is not procrastination, it’s more like cleaning up after having ceased to be a perfectionist with a really long to-do list: you work through these things so they don’t occupy space in your mind any longer.

Speaking of Goodreads: being the way things are, certain books (mostly ones written in German) can’t be found on Goodreads, so I eventually had to decide to add them there myself. By joining the Goodreads Librarians Group, I can add a book missing from the database myself (a thing I remember having done for the first time some ten years ago now).

So, scrolling down the page on which services are supported for both book data and cover images, I found that the German Deutsche Nationalbibliothek is supported, which is Germany’s national library (everything published in Germany is most likely there), but which in my case led nowhere. So I went with the publisher’s website instead as the source of book data and cover image. Fingers crossed the people at Goodreads accept this contribution (found it on Amazon as well, after looking for it on WorldCat, did not find it by searching for it on Amazon directly, using its ISBN though – odd). You can see my book request here, if you are into that.

From my bookshelf page on my website, I copy and paste the titles into my Zotero, copy the ISBN from there (to make sure I add the right version of the book on Goodreads to my “Want to Read” list; there are versions of books 😖) and drop it into Goodreads.

Ideally, I can move on with the next book right away, but otherwise I need to do the extra step described above.

In the end, there is only one more book left over which I need to add the same way as above. And that book is very special, in a lot of ways (but not special in the way Knauer’s Transformation is: as much as I enjoy ergodic literature, when the ergodism leaves the page and starts to format the book, things get really unusable really quickly), so I will add it after my first request goes through.

Just something to add to my ever-shrinking to-do.

Neat reading list. Looks like I moonlight as a librarian of sorts, as well as moonlighting as a hacker and illustrator.

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