Member-only story
Why I Only Follow One Publication on Medium
Optimizing my following community.
It has taken me a while to make sense of this massive site and understanding the publications is part of this discovery process.
At first, I was following all the publications that correlated with my interests and writing topics, including both small and large ones.
This ended up being a mess for me when I would try to find articles by those I follow. As of this moment, I follow 179 amazing writers and want my feed to show me their writings only.
The problem was when I went to look at the Following feed from the main page, I would get all these articles from people I wasn’t following. I realized these are the recent articles from the publications I was following, and since I was following many of the major publications, I was seeing mostly writers I wasn’t following.
While this is great if you want to see articles from writers you are not following, according to a certain topic, etc. It isn’t great if you are just trying to see the articles from those you are following.
I can’t remember 179 writers I follow very well and when it gets in the thousands I won’t have a chance, so I needed to unfollow all the publications I was following to only see the writers following.
With this adjustment, I feel in control of my following feed and able to keep up with the writers I find interesting.
If I want to expand my following feed to include writers I’m not following, then I can do so with more intention. For instance, I’m now following one publication that accepted me as a writer as well (besides my own publication). Here is the publication:
While this publication isn’t very large, it does have 135 followers. They have 92 writers (93 when I get around to writing there).
This is a good-sized publication for me to deal with. Instead of the huge publications which have thousands of writers, I can follow this one and not be overloaded in my…
