There is a misunderstanding about RSS and escaping algorithms. Sure, you are not under the social media control but you certainly are under the publisher control. Now you have to see everything that they publish. Which makes it the absolutely worst way to consume news. It becomes overwhelming and if you want inbox zero it’s another digital burden. The result is that I pretty much lost interest on following some websites through RSS because even though I do like some of the articles, it’s another way of doomscrolling when searching for the one thing that will give you the dopamine hit.

So after excluding the vast majority of websites, I was left with 10-20 websites that I did enjoy ~60% of the content they put out and I've subscribed to their newsletter. Which in most cases is full of tracking links but that’s a case for another topic.

> Now you have to see everything that they publish. Which makes it the absolutely worst way to consume news.

I agree on the second part, but the first part is not necessary. RSS is technically not hard, one can write one's own reader very quickly. You don't have to consume everything a publishers publishes, I don't even see everything a publisher publishes because I don't even request everything a publisher publishes.

I think the (your? my?) curation should focus on selecting some good sources (like the article says), but this means in no way that you should see everything all the time. Only when you want, in a quantity that's doable for you.

I can and do filter on certain feeds. My reader (tiny tiny rss) supports filtering based on the contents of the articles.

I filter sponsored articles or ones that need a subscription, articles that are a series, links to podcasts, recurring series..

> Now you have to see everything that they publish.

Ha, that's almost word-for-word on https://zacusca.net. [0]

And Zacusca represents a third way (the first two being reverse chron and newsletters, which both put control in the publisher's hands). If you can articulate what you enjoy then you can filter the RSS according to that.

[0] I'm working on Zacusca. Other, frankly more developed, alternatives include: - https://feeds.fun/ - https://scour.ing/about

You just need a reader that aggregates all your feeds into a single chronological list. Sure this means that you may never get thru the firehose, but it's easier to me than going to each subscription to read it individually. It's less work, and more fun as one big list.

Fetching the feed less often can help but you still have to treat high volume feeds differently. With my best discipline, I was opening my reader just once a day and getting just whatever happens to be “front page” at the moment. The few YT channels I “follow” via RSS only post content a few times a month.

>and if you want inbox zero

There's your problem. Turn off the "unread" indicators and just chill. You're not going to read everything and that's okay.