A plug: You should get an RSS reader — leastaction
Back in the prehistory of the web, in 1999, a group of people at Netscape (remember Netscape?) implemented a brilliant concept: syndication. The idea is that websites include a page called a feed, which contains all the information needed to open the website in a feed reader. If the website is updated, this will also show up in the reader. The format of the feed is called RSS, which no one is quite sure what it stands for. The most common version is Really Simple Syndication, so let's go with that.
So the idea is that you get an RSS reader, and you subscribe to whatever feeds you want. Do you follow someone who writes periodically on the web? Do you follow a podcast? How about a Youtube channel? A newsletter? Someone on a federated medium, like Mastodon, or Pixelfed? You can subscribe to all these feeds, and get to read/watch/listen to them whenever there's a new post or video or newsletter.
There are quite a few readers available. I'm a big fan of free stuff; I use Feeder on my desktop, which comes with a handy browser extension, and another one also called Feeder for Android on my mobile.
Here is a screenshot of the list of my feeds on my phone:
That little number beside each one on the right indicates new posts that I haven't read yet. Oh look, Alfredo on Mastodon has a new post:
OK, a bit snarky, but really. People shooting at weather stations. Now, I haven't published this post yet, so it's not showing up as unread in my feed list, but notice that I am following leastaction right here on write.as . Let's look at my previous post:
This is in fact a great way to follow this blog. You will know when there's an unread post in your feed reader and read it.
The great thing about RSS is that you are in control. You choose what content you want to follow, not Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. There is no algorithm, no tracking, no advertising, no surveillance. And I should add, that because you choose whom to follow, you are guaranteed to be following actual human beings and not some AI-generated “companion”.
The only reason why you may not have heard of RSS before is that there is no corporation behind it, promoting it constantly. This sort of thing propagates by word of mouth, and because we are so used to having content forced on us, it might even seem to be too good to be true. What's the catch, you're tempted to ask. There simply is no catch. Yes, this is as good as it sounds. This is exactly what the web should be, and it is all available for us to enjoy.