RSS as a social media alternative

I quote from an interesting March 9, 2023 post on Privacy Dad’s Blog titled Control Your Own Content with RSS and AntennaPod. The opening sentence caught my attention:

One of the easiest ways avoid spending time on social media is to curate your own news and media feeds.

Privacy Dad

RSS as a social media alternative is a subject of interest to me. I previously wrote articles advocating for a well-curated RSS/ATOM feed list as an alternative to Facebook and an alternative to Twitter. By combining a feed reader with a read-it-later solution, one can also discover new sites and posts through articles from a defined list of feeds.

It should come as no surprise that I agree with Mr. Privacy Dad in the main. But it is important when touting feeds as an alternative to social media to make the positive case for feeds instead of the negative case against social media (except TikTok, which should be banned). In the spirit of my essays on productivity (or against productivity porn) and doing instead of window-shopping, I advocate for the positive benefits of curating a feed list and turning the feed list into a portal to good writing and media on the internet. Managing your own feed list from the comfort of a cozy feed reader and read-it-later solution makes it easier to find good and meaningful writing and media online than sifting through social big tech social media timelines and small tech activity streams. People are more likely to use big social media less when they find a positive alternative than when they are told why the most-used social media platforms are bad.