Dear everybody swearing they’ll pay Facebook, Twitter or Instagram $50 for normal timelines with no ads: There’s this thing. It’s called the open, independent web. Join us, and then, help your friends do the same. You can then use a plain-old RSS reader to follow your friends.
I’d prefer to use an RSS feed to follow friends but it would not be in the interest of fakebook to charge for that service. The minute they do that, their userbase drops in a major way.
Well then, if you want to use RSS to follow your friends, there are things out there that will let you turn Twitter and Facebook timelines into RSS feeds. Add to that people’s personal blogs/sites, and yeah you can get yourself a pretty decent non-echo-chamber experience. Because that’s the other problem with social media algorithums. They promote echo chambers. Sometimes those are good, like when you want to get away, but more often than not they’re bad.
I knew there were, I just did not know what they were.
The only part that’s a pain is that you’re required to create apps on the various platforms and then copy keys. Twitter’s not too bad about this, but Facebook just has to be difficult.
Run an ad blocker. On Twitter, punish advertisers by blocking any accounts you see promoted tweets from that you don’t follow, and for accounts you do follow, mark any promoted tweets you see with I don’t like this ad. No need to pay for ad free timelines, as long as the advertisers aren’t making money off me, I don’t care how much they’re wasting paying the platforms.