Accidentally Reinventing the Newsletter

Lately, I've been turned on to the idea of more intentional power use while computing. Low-Tech Magazine's solar website, along with the note about bandwidth being cheap but not free on the best motherfucking website, have me thinking about what I can do to reduce power usage and bandwidth requests in my own computing. Could I be doing my daily computing on an ARM Single-Board computer, which would use single digit wattage instead of the multiple watts of my x86 laptop? Could I be using an E-ink screen instead of an LCD/LED? I'm aware that the majority of power consumption in computing comes from cryptocurrency, LLMs, and major commercial websites, but I'm trying to think about what I can change.

=> https://bestmotherfucking.website/

This line of thinking led me to a funny thought about my RSS reader. I use newsboat, and I have it set to refresh the feeds when I open the program. This results in it sending out a stream of HTTP requests to refresh the atom/rss xml files from the various folks I follow. However, many of them come back empty. Most blogs I follow post less than once a day, many significantly less, and so for a given refresh, most requests are wasted.

I wondered how this could be optimized. What I came up with was a system where, instead of readers polling the creator for updates, the creator would be able to send the update to the reader's client directly. Obviously, this would require the creator to maintain a list of subscribers server-side, and might make it difficult for readers to unsubscribe, as it's not as simple as removing the url from their feed-reader, but it would reduce the number of useless HTTP requests being sent. Goal accomplished!

Reader, it was not until I read another blog 2 days later that I realized what I had created. The author of this blog advertised at the end of their post a link to subscribe to their newsletter. I had just accidentally reinvented the email newsletter. Funny how a little bit of defamiliarization can make an idea seem novel. I wasn't thinking about email, so my brain didn't make the connection.

I am now curious, though, whether email or RSS via HTTP is the more efficient way to receive these notifications. After all, many email solutions involve repeatedly querying a mail server. Would that really be an improvement?