In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information

> As Facebook would push for more engagement, some bands would flood their pages with multiple posts per day

The causation is opposite, and it's the whole problem with chronological feeds, including RSS - chronological feeds incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to get attention. That's one of the main reasons fb and other sites implemented algorithmic feeds in the first place. If you take away the time component, posters compete on quality instead.

> The story we are sold with algorithmic curation is that it adapts to everyone’s taste and interests, but that’s only true until the interests of the advertisers enter the picture.

Yea, exactly, but as emphasized here: The problem is not curation, the problem is the curator. Feed algorithms are important, they solve real problems. I don't think going back to RSS and chronolgical feed is the answer.

I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service," which would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your personal goals.

I've ditched RSS feeds more than 10 years ago but I'm increasingly wanting to go back to them. Thank you for sharing this blog post, it'll help to get me started.

I love RSS. Like all the old web tech the user is in control. If I like a page/site I'll look for an RSS to keep up to date with it, if one doesn't exist I'll likely forget about it. I'm not signing up for email updates.

I'm self-hosting FreeRSS [1] with Docker on a Hetzner VM. Fast, clutter-free, has everything I need.

[1] https://freshrss.org/index.html

Simple is use your thunderbird mail to read RSS feeds. Check https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feed...