Remember me‽ RSS? We went to school together! I sat in the margin of your email app and, oh, the funs we had. You’d click on links and we’d laugh and laugh.

Then came this Social Media thing and you just left me to sit while you went off with your new instant friends. I won’t say I didn’t cry a tear or to. “They’ll be back! You’ll see”

Well it took a while but – hello old friend, hello, as Lionel Ritchie says.

Social Media’s a bubblin’ mass of lies and fakery and what should you do, you ask?

RSS, Baby. RSS

RSS. Really Simple Syndication, in one iteration of the TLA**.

Lots of clever, funloving peeps have their own websites or you can easily slap one together for free and be known as__ @ wordpress.com. This is the only site I know well enough to swear at but there’s tons of others, you do you.

Set up your RSS feed per their instructions.

Sweet Relief is yours.

On WP-hosted sites, you can go to an admired site and put /feed at the end of it. Instant RSS.

Use something like Feedly or look up how your mail app handles feeds. Turn that on and start feedin.’

All the services and weather sites likely have RSS because they never gave up on it.

Think of RSS as the national-international communications solution your heart has been pitter-pattering for.

Until Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky* is something you jump to (did he seriously not have a Non-Compete‽) or Mastodon’s snorting and pawing has you clicking over, RSS wants to be your pal. Friends don’t leave friends on social media.

Bring it in, baby. Time for hugsies.

*H/T to techcrunch writer Sarah Perez

**TLA = Three Letter Acronym. I’ll be here all week.