Hard Drives Are Good For You
As I've been continuing my experiment with music Un-streaming, it's made me appreciate music and my time with it more fully again. Fewer options and more friction have given me deeper enjoyment. So I've started looking for other ways to apply some of this system to other media. There's just something to your media taking up space digitally or physically. Here's what I've come up with so far that's working for me.
RSS
I honestly never fully got on the RSS reading bandwagon back in its heyday. I was an early podcast adopter, but I typically just bookmarked a bunch of my favorite websites and would visit them to read. Now the RSS feeds of a lot of major outlets are dead or limited, but it's not impossible to build out a feed of my own that I completely control. The hardest part has been finding places that still host full text RSS feeds for things like world news. But because of the drying up of mainstream RSS feeds it's a great opportunity to ramp up my blog and privately run journalism consumption.
Most blogs will have a feed if they're on one of the major platforms (my current home-base bearblog.dev being one). Also I've found a lot of sites run on Ghost will have full text RSS for paid subscribers (ie one of my faves 404 Media). NPR also still has a lot of feeds just not full text which is fine for me.
I'm not going to run out of hard drive space for my RSS feed. But being involved in the manual curation and maintenance of it, much like my music library, increases my appreciation of it. I can still be very informed and very online but break the infinite scroll. I tend to enjoy more variety also compared to when I was mainly finding articles from socials.
TubeArchivist
This next one is admittedly in its infancy so I'll have to revisit it later to update on if it actually sticks. I've been playing around with paring back my YouTube watching a bunch of different ways over the years. Recently I stumbled on TubeArchivist and thought it may be a way to apply some of the good parts of having my music "take up space" to YouTube. Essentially it rips/downloads videos from my subscriptions so I can watch them as files on my hard drive. I've slowly been migrating some subscriptions over there and I'm trying to be pretty choosy about who makes the cut. I was also able to get it hooked up to Jellyfin so I can watch my YouTube subs on there now also after they're ripped into the library. Like I said I'm not sure if this one will stick so we shall see.
Conclusion
At the end of the day I think having the things I dedicate my time and attention to take up hard drive, physical, visual space helps me make better decisions and appreciate them more. Infinite access is hella convenient. But it can lead to choice paralysis and feeling numbed out of the very things that once brought me so much joy. So maybe try having stuff take up some space. It might work for you too.