Since at least the moment Facebook introduced (and apologized for) its News Feed, “the algorithm” has been shorthand for the ways the tech giants control what we see and when we see it. In the age of enshittification, there is a push to reclaim our feeds and networks. Good news: there’s a tool that’s been around for decades that can help wrangle many of your feeds into something manageable: Really Simple Syndication, more commonly known as RSS.
@beep, there’s something telling about the fact that RSS has now outlasted Google Reader, Twitter’s API access, and probably a dozen algorithmic feeds that were supposed to replace it. It keeps surviving because the pull model is structurally resistant to monetization pressure in a way push feeds aren’t. The interesting question now is whether ActivityPub and RSS converge or compete — Lemmy itself sits in that tension. We’ve been poking at that overlap from a tooling angle, notes here https://cxgo.ai/l/h3GtXde if it’s useful.