I think the great power of RSS is being able to quickly sift through information. I use newsboat, so every title is on a single line and information density is therefore at its max. I can quickly skim through a day's worth of news articles from dozens of sources, blog posts, youtube channels, journal articles, pubmed search hits, hacker news posts, and reddit posts, in hardly any time compared to visiting these platforms individually and sifting through one at a time.

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.

Looking back, at least my “old ways” of using RSS involved a lot of FOMO and inevitable information overload.

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.

One thing I wish RSS readers were better at is more granular controls over how they do workflows and notifications. Podcasts actually do this well, but regular old text-RSS does not.

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.

The alternative is trusting someone (or something) else, who's values, motives, and incentives are rarely obvious, to curate your news for you.

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.

You’re 100% describing how news organizations operate, that are source of the actual news. They have same initiatives. Skipping middle man curator leaves you with same fundamental problems.

There are RSS readers that allow you to use blocklists to filter out articles (using regex too).