I am not on Facebook. I’ve never been on Facebook. I’m not on Twitter/X. I’ve never been on them. My entire social media profile consists of Irreal. I’ve always had an aversion to things like Facebook and Twitter without really understanding why. Even after it became clear that that they were mainly about harvesting your information for advertising purposes, I didn’t really think much about my initial aversion.
Taliesyn Walker has a nice post that helps explain some of this. The problem with Facebook and the others, he says, is that they’re walled gardens that curate the information they show you in such a way as to increase your engagement and influence you in various ways. The problem is that you have no control over what you see and what you don’t see.
The answer, according to Walker is RSS. He describes it as a distributed information system that lets you choose whatever content you’re interested in without any intermediaries filtering it for nefarious reasons. I agree with all that and have, in fact, said much the same.
If, like me, you’re already convinced that RSS is the way to get your content, Walker’s post is still very valuable. One of the supposed downsides to RSS is that it’s harder to discover content. Walker shows lots of ways of doing that and to do things like follow YouTube feeds without having to actually subscribe to YouTube and deal with Google.
Finally, there’s the issue of RSS readers. Walker has many suggestions but neglects to mention the best RSS reader, Elfeed. I’ve been using it for a few years and it’s just perfect for me. I can customize what I see in a number of ways and, of course, the source code is right there if I need it to do something completely new. It runs under Emacs, of course, which is another benefit.
Lots of folks say they use Emacs just to get Org-mode or Majit and I’d add Elfeed to that list. It’s that good. In any case, take a look at Walker’s post. It’s well worth a read.