RSS is King: Why Having Subscribers or Followers in Sites You Neither Own Nor Control is Loss of Autonomy and Search is Mostly Slop (Plagiarising Sites, Not Linking to Them)
Because digital connections in third parties aren't assets; they endow another party with tremendous power over people (e.g. MElon getting to decide who can and cannot reach people or what messages to "dim down")
RSS feeds - like planets* - are a very old concept. My writings have used RSS feeds for 22 years and this approach brings "repeat readers".
Many sites failed to grasp this, even if they have had decades to prepare and most of them wasted time in social control media (chasing addicts) while going out of the way to remove their own RSS feeds, which sometimes came as "part of the package" in the content management software in use.
For sites to rely on readers using their bookmarks or referring to Web directories is misguided because Web directories lost their lustre due to the "just Google it!" mindset and many people rely more on history (e.g. Firefox "AwesomeBar") than an unsearchable list of sites without slice-based seeking.
Many news sites are complaining - more so in recent years/months - that due to search online turning into slop prompts (not because it's useful, those contain misinformation and likely constitute plagiarism - a subject of many legal actions all around the world).
In the case of Linux Today, it abandoned social control media some months ago [1, 2] but retains its RSS feed. Foolishly, however, it no longer broadcasts having an RSS feed anywhere in the site's pages. Firefox no longer helps people adopt, understand, and find/discover RSS feeds in sites either.
In Linux Today, to find the RSS feed in the front page one must check the page source, scroll down to line 1017, then use horizontal scroll bars to find it at ~/feed/. It's like they go out of their way to hide it, dooming their own destiny and assuring irrelevance.
Not many people - especially younger people - still use RSS or even know what this means. But failing to capture those who do use RSS reader is leaving/rendering oneself vulnerable prey to GAFAM (which turns sites into slop to avoid sending them any visits) and social control media giants that penalise for having a link to "external" sites. █
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* Planets are not RSS feeds, but they're made out of RSS feeds and they can have RSS feeds (aggregated output, based on pertinent inputs). The issue with planets is, someone controls them, so they're an instrument of control/censorship unless decentralised somehow (well, that would involve advertising the OPML file of their building blocks so that people take away what they can though it's still subjected to addition/removal by dictators prior to export of an OPML file). Planets are risky and unpredictable in an increasingly censorious planet. They conflate undesirable (or "I don't agree with" or "it hurts my feelings") with censorable.
Image source: Kings College