Goodbye, Mailchimp & Twitter. Hello, RSS.
Website owners, including yours truly, want you to see what’s new on their sites:
- New products
- New services
- New content
Some website owners mail postcards and catalogs to site followers and customers. Some site owners text their followers. Many site owners ask followers to subscribe to their email lists.
I long used the email-subscription approach to tell readers about new articles. I no longer do because:
- Double opt-in is burdensome.
- Visitors worried about spam.
- The cost:benefit ratio got too high.
- My email-subscription service provider told me that it could kill my account at any time.
Goodbye, Mailchimp
Mailchimp was that email-subscription service provider. Mailchimp changed its terms of service on 23 November 2020 to include this verbiage:
Mailchimp doesn’t allow accounts … that promote … hateful … Content. To this end, we may …. terminate your account if you … distribute any Content that we determine, in our sole discretion, contains … Hateful Content. This means any statement … or other Content that in our sole judgment could be reasonably perceived to harm … others based solely on race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, disease, or immigration status. We also may … terminate your account if we determine, in our sole discretion, that you are … a person that has publicly made a comment or statement, or otherwise publicly made known a position … that could be reasonably perceived as Hateful Content …; or a person or organization that has acted in such a way as could be reasonably perceived to support, condone, encourage, or represent Hateful Content … . Mailchimp also does not allow the distribution of Content that is, in our sole discretion, materially false, inaccurate, or misleading in a way that could deceive or confuse others about important events, topics, or circumstances. If you violate any of these rules, then we may … terminate your account.
Did you get that? “Hate” is whatever Mailchimp defines it to be when it comes to my account.
- I could lose my account by writing that I hated advice to kids to drink water every 20 minutes.
- I could lose it by noting that Kenyans and Ethiopians dominate marathon records.
- Or, I could lose it by posting an April Fools’ Day joke as an article.
Mailchimp wanted me to keep paying it to build an email-subscription list that it could destroy at any time!
Yes, there are other email-subscription service providers. But, switching to another provider is not easy. (I know. I used three providers over the years.) Plus, if Mailchimp will claim “hate” to kill an account, then expect other providers to do the same.
Goodbye, Twitter
What, then, was I to do after shutting down my email list?
- Postcards cost too much.
- Faxes would reach almost nobody.
- Text messages cost too much.
- Social-media sites are problematic.
“Censorship is the enemy of social trust.”
Tucker Carlson said this on Tucker Carlson Tonight on 17 December 2020. He was discussing the launch of vaccination against the China virus.
Carlson gave these quotes to illustrate censorship by Big Tech:
- “Disinformation can equal death.”
— Melinda Gates, Co-Chair of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- “Build demand for vaccination in communities worldwide” and to “address vaccine misinformation and share resonant and reassuring information on vaccination.”
— Facebook’s Vaccine Policy
- “Require people to remove Tweets which advance harmful false or misleading narratives about COVID-19 vaccinations.”
— Twitter’s Vaccine Policy
Did you get that? Big Tech moguls Bill and Melinda Gates believe that they can decide what vaccination “disinformation” means. Facebook decides what vaccine “misinformation” means. Twitter decides the meaning of “misleading narratives” about vaccinations.
I left Facebook a few years ago — soon after it began to behave as a publisher in spite of its Section-230 protection.
Posting content-announcement videos on YouTube might work. But, they would be overkill. Plus, YouTube has shown its willingness to flaunt Section-230 protection. Look, for example, at the number of PragerU videos that YouTube puts on its restricted list.
I liked Twitter until it, too, decided that it would flaunt its Section-230 protection. The New York Post is America’s oldest newspaper. The Post wrote about Hunter Biden’s laptop a few weeks before the Trump/Biden 2020 election. The Post then tweeted about that article. Twitter locked out access to the tweet. Surveys now say that some 10% of Biden voters would have voted for Trump, had they known about that article. Twitter acted as a publisher, not a platform, to help to throw the election in favor of Biden.
Twitter censors or annotates other content, too:
- Criticism of the China-virus mask or Muslim veil as dehumanizing;
- Use of a famous transsexual’s earlier name when referring to an earlier event;
- Links to peer-reviewed scientific articles about the China virus.
Twitter is Big Tech on steroids. Twitter believes that it knows best what is true, what is correct, and what you should read. Twitter wants “The Great Reset” to put elite technocrats in charge of everything.
So, when it came to Twitter as a replacement for Mailchimp, the words of the Shark Tank TV-show judges came to mind: “I’m out.”
Still, I wanted Twitter’s messaging benefits without its “We know best.” overlord behavior. I looked at Parler, whose founder seems — at least at this writing — to understand what Section 230 means. But, using Parler instead of Twitter still put me at the mercy of a social-media site’s whims.
Hello, RSS
Really Simple Syndication — also known as “RSS” — gives you a simpler way to get notified when I post a new article. You use an RSS reader in the form of a cellphone app or browser extension to follow the “feed” of my site’s articles.
This site’s new-article notifications after 27 December 2020 use RSS instead of Mailchimp and Twitter.
I understand, if:
- you don’t want to add another app to your cellphone or extension to your computer browser;
- you agree with what Twitter, Mailchimp, and other Big Tech companies are doing; or,
- you disagree with what they are doing, but you don’t see the harm in me using them to notify you.
No hard feelings. You do you. I cannot, though, continue to use providers that:
- don’t support freedom of speech;
- ignore the rule of law;
- will shut me down when they disagree with me.
If you do want to follow this site with RSS, then keep reading!
If you do not now have an RSS-reader app or browser extension, then get an RSS-reader app or browser extension. Consider:
- Feeder for Android;
- RSS Feed Reader for Apple iOS;
- RSS Feed Reader for Google Chrome.
There are other good RSS-reader apps and browser extensions. Get what works for you.
Once you have an RSS-reader app or browser extension, then add and follow this URL:
- https://www.spryfeet.com/feed/
How to Set up Feeder for Android
For example, here are steps to set up Feeder for Android to do this:
- Get and install Feeder from the Google Play store.
- Open it.
- Touch “Add more feeds?” on the “All feeds” screen.
- Enter “https://www.spryfeet.com/feed/” (without the quotation marks) at the “URL to feed” prompt.
- Touch [Go] on the on-screen keyboard.
- Touch the verbiage that appears beneath the “URL to feed” prompt.
- Touch the [ADD FEED] button that appears.
- Confirm that you see titles and initial lines of the latest articles from SpryFeet.com.
- Touch the stack of three dots in the upper-right corner of the “All feeds” screen.
- Touch “Settings” in the dropdown menu.
- Set “Check for updates” to “Every day” in the “Synchronization” section of the “Settings” screen.
- Change anything else on the “Settings” screen as you desire.
- Touch the left-pointing arrow in the upper-left corner of the “Settings” screen.
- Touch the “Notify for new items” bell icon in the upper-right corner of the “All feeds” screen so that it appears to ring.
That’s it. Feeder now will notify you about each new article from this site. You can read an article by touching the item for it on the “All feeds” screen or on the “SpryFeet™” screen. You can switch to the latter screen by choosing it from the three-stripe menu in the upper-left corner.
