Use RSS Readers Instead of Social Control Media
We currently have a series about Social Control Media (see Part I and Part II) and it'll run until Friday (parts 3-4 are fully drafted already), maybe even longer. Some shrewd people once said that complaining about something without pointing to alternatives would be unproductive, maybe counterproductive.
Well, what to use if all Social Control Media is abandoned/avoided?
Simple. Subscribe to sites that you like and trust. Use RSS.
rachelbythebay has just mentioned Roy and Rianne's Righteously Royalty-free RSS Reader (R.R.R.R.R.R.), which is software we use to find and curate news [1, 2]. We developed various extensions for (or around) it. It gives us good visibility, exposing not some "platform" like Mastodon but instead direct access to actual sites run by their authors. Instead of seeing people in some clunky JavaScript 'Web' GUI we see a breadth of headlines, which we can sort and analyse before choosing what to read.
RSS readers were designed to save time. Social Control Media was (and still is) designed to waste time. Remember that. █