Comment by cgriswald
5 years ago
Apps and websites often don’t honor their own configuration choices. They use loose definitions to slide in advertisements or other unwanted information. They do not give you the granularity to decide what types of information you actually want. They also change them after you’ve taken the time to get it sort of working for you.
You’re not going to give people agency by having them press a button provided by someone else. The button doesn’t really do anything. “Cold turkey” is really the only solution to these mind games.
This is a good point. Feeds should be available in well-defined programmatic formats (such as RSS or ActivityPub) so that they can be processed outside the domain of the app whose data carries them; if necessary this should be enforced by law. This would make it a lot easier for users to consume those feeds in ways that they control, and not that Big Tech controls.