You don't own your reading list. You rent it.
Here is an uncomfortable one: you do not own your reading list. You rent it. Every "follow" button you have pressed in the last decade put your reading relationship inside a company's database, where it can be ranked, throttled, or ended the day the business model changes. You did not sign anything. You just stopped owning it. It was not always like this. Feeds were the quiet machinery that kept the web interoperable. RSS and Atom meant a site, a reader, and a robot could all agree on the same s
Here is an uncomfortable one: you do not own your reading list. You rent it.
Every "follow" button you have pressed in the last decade put your reading relationship inside a company's database, where it can be ranked, throttled, or ended the day the business model changes. You did not sign anything. You just stopped owning it.
It was not always like this. Feeds were the quiet machinery that kept the web interoperable. RSS and Atom meant a site, a reader, and a robot could all agree on the same stream without asking anyone's permission. You published once, and anything could read it: whatever app, whatever order, no algorithm in the middle.
Then it eroded. Plenty of sites ship no feed at all now, and "follow us" quietly became "create an account on someone else's platform."
The reason is not mysterious. Platforms had every incentive to close the loop, because a feed lets you leave, and an account does not. So the industry swapped "here is my stream, read it however you like" for "log in to see updates," and a generation of sites simply stopped publishing feeds, because the platform was where the audience was.
That is the trade you made without noticing. The open format that asked nothing of you got replaced by a login that asks for everything. Your reading list used to live in your reader and survive a company changing its mind, its ranking, or its whole business. Now it lives in their database and survives exactly as long as they allow.
Getting it back is not nostalgia. It is infrastructure for independence: tooling that treats feeds as a first-class citizen, aggregates the sources you actually choose, and keeps that stream under your control instead of a platform's.
The full case for why this is worth fixing, and what feed-first tooling looks like, is here: https://mederic.me/blog/open-web-feeds
So, honestly: how many of the people and sites you follow could you still read tomorrow if the platform in the middle disappeared tonight?
