I don't use any social media and I've found that many businesses at least neglect their website and quite understandably resort to posting on social media. The few local news sites that I use usually will have an article about a business or a news story and then link to instagram or twitter rather than their website.

I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything but the usefulness of the web lessens year over year. Now that the platforms have locked down even viewing an instagram or twitter fee without an account I almost wish I could just get rid of all links pointing to them.

The easiest thing would be to give in an make an account but I'm too stubborn ha.

During the pandemic lockdowns I found that reactivating my Facebook account was the best way to figure out if a shop did still exist and how they changed their opening hours ... websites unmaintained all in the walled garden. And looking at my "news feed" reminded me that I don't really miss anything from there.

I figure that any business that effectively only communicates using social media is a business that actively doesn't want me as a customer.

Good riddance.

I don't agree with that and think you should reconsider. There are only so many hours a day for most small businesses and they get the most out of social media compared to their website plus theirs a strong chance they themselves or their employees can use instagram compared to something like squarespace.

I have no moral obligation to support social media companies (who I have serious ethical issues with) simply because there are businesses who choose to use them as their sole communications platforms.

In my experience, RSS isn't close to the level of widespread high quality support it had in the early "web2.0" days on the server side - picking an RSS client even with the demise of Google Reader hasn't been my issue with RSS in recent years anyway, its just the content isn't there anymore like it once was.

People I want to follow don't have the technical chops to self-host. One can say it's sad, but I think it's worse that one needs technical chops to self-host.

Come up with a way for anyone to publish content from their phone, with no subscription, and no need for an always-on server, and you'll have the basis for something less centralized.

Tumblr's owned by Automattic now, and they're throwing in some Indieweb features ([this] doesn't look official, but it actually is!). It also has proper RSS. Using a platform like that rather than a totally closed one like FB seems to me like a step up.

[this]: https://github.com/indieweb/tumblr

How do you discover people in this system, though?

And at the end of the day, there has to be some kind of server somewhere. Even if it's using SMS or DNS or something to accomplish this.

At least one complaint is that a lot of content has moved on. And maybe you can just ignore that content. Which I'm not sure would be wrong.

That's fair. There are a lot of big news sites that don't have RSS anymore, like axios.com

But, they do: https://www.axios.com/feeds/feed.rss

Your mileage may vary, but I only ever wanted RSS feeds that provide the actual article content. Just spitting out a feed of links back to the site with headlines is not how I or many others used RSS and RSS readers wayback when. Full article feeds have all but died out now anyway, another nail in the RSS coffin for me.

That's my issue as well with the RSS feeds I use. None of them are full article feeds anymore. These sorts of RSS feeds are a way I can still centralize my feed data, even though they isn't true offline copies. I think this has to do with monetization and wanting to change the text of pages ad-hoc.

It's of course monetization. Everyone jumped on giving away their content via RSS/public APIs in the early rush to web2.0 style standards, then of course retreated from that position when it became clear directing eyeballs to the actual site and keeping those eyeballs there for as long as possible was required to maximize ad revenues, especially for sites giving away written content. The only full content feeds that really survive are the occasional blog or site that offers it as a bonus to paying subscribers.

I don't know how you found this but I stand corrected!

No worries. I did this search on Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=axios+rss I've found this helps to find these sorts of feeds that don't easily show on the site's themselves.

And a lot of people who blogged more now do twitter threads. Or they just don't get started doing blogs.

that nobody else is doing it. There's a reason it's called a social network. The value is in the connections, hence the dominance of platforms.

How do you call it when the platform replaces the social network? 80% of the content is created to acquire relevance in/to the platform not to create or consolidate meaningful relationships.