What FB used to be good-ish at and is now mediocre at is being a social feed of friends and family. Dreamwidth is better at that than FB is, but FB's got the network effect of users already. Convincing people to switch is problematic.
RSS brings you the publications you're aware of, and maybe a few bloggers with the time, money, and energy to maintain a blog.
I can't ask a journalist for more details or check their work. I don't know how well they translated the niche knowledge required to understand the story for public consumption.
Facebook comment sections can be a cesspool, but with groups you can usually find an actual subject matter expert who's engaged with what's happening and is engaging as an interested observer (not a preacher) that you can drop a line for more details.
RSS is about passive consumption. It has its place, but it can't replace the tools Facebook give (engaged) users to understand the world better.
There used to be a semi static structure of vetted journalism who would bet their reputation on a certain amount of quality.. but now it's not enough and people have the tools so they DIY.. but in the end we'll all need a less random structure .. I think it's exhausting to always be worried about who is a real expert on the matter, are these real time events really what I think they are. New needs the old, old needs the new.
I only follow outlets and journalists whose thoroughness and thoughtfulness I know and respect.
Following an RSS feed for a blog also means you can click into the links and see comment threads for any article, so it's not any different. And Google Reader (PBUH), had social tools integrated into it as well so it isn't even a foreign concept to RSS.
People care as much about what the people they know think about something as what they themselves think about something.
RSS readers almost never inline comments/discussion, can't easily surface your closest friends' comments at the top, don't have a consistent interface for leaving comments on items, and don't notify you of replies.
RSS is inherently antisocial, like watching TV or reading the newspaper alone.
Two things about comment threads. Does everything have to have a comment thread? And this isn't just Facebook specific question, the vast majority of media sites put comment threads below their articles. Clearly, allowing user engagement at massive scales comes with a cost: moderation, disinformation, etc.
On Facebook, I can't choose to disable comments or likes on a per-post basis. They are always there, whether I like it or not. The only agency I have is to change the visibility of the entire post, and even that's not necessarily what I want.
I only post something on social media if I'm willing to engage with others. Comments are ephemeral and very much direct. They are specific writing format. There are times when I want to put something up but I'm not interested in this kind of direct and immediate feedback.
> RSS is inherently antisocial, like watching TV or reading the newspaper alone.
Newspapers, RSS and TV are only "anti-social" to the extent that don't get immediacy of giving feedback in the form of a comment or a like.
You are very much free to share and publish your own opinions about TV and newspapers via different channels. You could even write a reader letter to news outlets if you don't like what they publish. Or you could e-mail your opinions to friends and discuss them via a mailing list.
RSS itself doesn't give you that immediacy either. But you're very much free to make a post on your own blog, discussing someone else's content and have a discussion via RSS feeds and pingbacks. Back in the late 00's, during the heyday of blogs and RSS, that's exactly what happened for a brief while.
The main reasons why social media are popular is immediacy, visibility and short-lived. The massive downside of such communication is that it reduces the opportunity to reflect and make well-thought, nuanced arguments. While immediate communication has it's place, it's not healthy to have that as your only type of communication or learning about the world around you.
But I would like to add a constructive note: I’ve been dabbling around the RSS space for a long time, including a ten-year-old feed service and web client. In my opinion, RSS has failed where centralized social media succeeded largely because of discoverability.
I’ve put RSS clients in front of plenty of users, and the response is invariably, “okay, now what?” Using a bookmarklet to subscribe to feeds is confusing and unnatural to them. They want getting The Atlantic RSS feed to be as easy as following The Atlantic on Twitter. And they do want to see the “liked” articles of their friends who are fellow readers.
To anyone who is trying to make RSS fetch again, I beg them to take the take the social and discoverability issues seriously.
Incidentally, I think the Overcast podcast app (remember, podcasts are also RSS) is an ideal model of an in-app directory.
As for social, the share button is always there. If you want Facebook, why not just use Facebook?
You can declare RSS a failure when sites stop offering it.
Just gave it a try, kind of hate the design, but the search is very, very good.
For my hundreds of feeds, I get through them in like 10 minutes if nothing peaks my interest, then I'm done with the internet for the day. It's so liberating to be free of platforms that insist on the infinite scrolling and other dark patterns, such as bloated pages full of empty space rather than content, that force you to spend more time engaged/addicted.
A key lesson I’ve since learned is to be much more minimalist and deliberate about what I subscribe to. The news feed under my control now feels serene relative to the adversarial offerings of major social media outlets.
There are some feeds where I just do not care about anything older than a day or 3 and would rather it just automatically ignores them on refresh. There are some feeds where I prefer them held indefinitely. I'd love a master dashboard where I can program this in on a per-feed basis.
There's also feeds where grouping matters. Like with webcomics where chronology is important and I'm a few issues behind, I'd like them to be presented in chronological order and grouped together. In ones where it's not I'd prefer them as part of the feed.
And then there's the tendency to collapse all content into one format. There's blogs where visuals are very important and I'd prefer they be displayed in the page's default and there's others where I'd prefer a "reader" view. Some apps design around it, but many still don't.
Even if you could find a curator that you have significant faith in, eventually, they will become a centralized target that powerful interests can carrot or stick in various ways to push their interests into your curated feed.
Like… yeah, it's good, give it a try. Do recommend. four and a half out of five stars.