#if tunglr were to really kick it now (so in a context where there isn't any equivalent platform) i'd probably go to dreamwidth for posting

[sol-flo]

social media exodus, rss feeds and you

whenever a social media platform hacks and coughs we see the same fucking scramble of leaving to different platforms, and not everyone is gonna go to the same place and so on and so forth and it's a pain. if only there was a platform-agnostic way to keep track of people on the internet...

enter the humble rss feed.

note: candied reptile's rss resources page is very comprehensive and a recommended read. i'm mostly summarizing things so i can sell you on the idea. all the actual how-tos can be found over there!

reading

there's 1 william feed readers out there. there are services to sync your feeds between devices if you want to read on your phone but you don't need any of that to start reading, and migrating is very easy because you can export / import your urls as opml files. you can start anywhere to get a feel for it.

and you can read basically anything! my url list includes blogs, personal websites, webcomics and newsletters. i follow sortition social, which shows me a random indie web feed per day. i've followed bsky accounts through rss before, you can use it for youtube channels, there's probably a bunch of other uses i haven't even considered before. i use a firefox extension called feed preview to better find rss/atom feeds while browsing the web.

writing

writing to a rss feed is very easy (you can copy-paste entry templates or use generators online), and so is hosting. you just need to be able to link to the file and you're golden. mine is hosted on neocities (free) since that's where my website is. there's also nekoweb and bearblog and if you really want to use it just for basic updates so people don't lose track of you as you figure out where to go or something you can use status.cafe. you have a ton of hosting options.

and well. you can write whatever you'd like. i use my feed for linking website updates, the typical use-case, but you can very well use it for text-posting, it doesn't have to be a big deal (a concept called rosting that i'm not sure exists outside ex cohost users vocab — russhdown is meant to generate feeds for this). feeds are versatile.

this is not a one stop solution

feeds are not social media. a personal website (the natural second step here, basically the only way to have an online presence that's less reliant on platforms like tunglr and shit) are not social media. i love them both dearly but as i've written before, i won't pretend losing a social media platform doesn't suck, because these are low-interaction forms of posting. i'm a big fan of email but let's be real, we're not really emailing each other short comments on silly things, even if maybe we should.

my feed advocacy comes more from a place of seeking stability. i believe it's a lot easier to keep calm during social media decay if you know you have a stable place to communicate from, and a way to keep track of others, regardless of whether they're moving to a different platform than you or not. start getting familiar with feeds now so you don't have to rush later, is what i think.