I don’t know about you, but I’m fucking sick to death of social media sites, platforms, and the choices and recommendations they make “for you” which have nothing to do with “me” and everything to do with them, their choices, their biases, and most importantly their profits.

Consequently, I’ve been very happy & have grown quite attached to a sort of old-school RSS reader revival called Fraidycat. I use it as a browser-plugin in Firefox. Unlike some of the old RSS readers I remember testing back in the heydays of blogging, it just shows you the titles of posts most recently updated by things you follow – which could be blogs, subreddits, Youtube accounts, Twitters, accounts on Medium, etc.

It is simple, works great, and now that I have built up something like 40+ sources I follow, it is a basically complete and excellent not just replacement but strong upgrade from any “official” social media feed’s homepage that I have ever used. It just shows me what I follow, and no other “recommended” garbage that I don’t want. I love it.

You might say, well, how do you find new stuff to follow then? Just through normal casual web browsing, for starters. Secondarily, through following links within the sources that I follow out to other sources.

Now, whenever I open Fraidycat, I routinely get lost in probably 6-10 tabs of highly interesting, highly targeted content that I’m interested in and surprised by, instead of doom scrolling past a bunch of stuff that I hate, that annoys me, or that I’m just not remotely interested in.

In short, it’s revolutionized my web browsing, and made cross-platform blogs, etc. become my “main squeeze” again on the internet. As someone who got their start in old-school blogging, it feels good and natural as hell. There are very few improvements that have happened to web publishing since blogs, in my opinion.

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