I keep seeing people - especially on Hacker News - talk about alternatives for Twitter. To me, it seems so obvious: have a website with a (micro)blog and an accompanying feed to publish things. Use whatever newsreader suits your needs - whether that's separate newsreader software or a built-in solution inside your timeline - to subscribe to other websites and feeds.

I hear two concerns coming in already:

1. but not everybody is going to read my texts, on Twitter I can reach millions of people!?
2. but I can't subscribe to this or that person/organisation because they don't have a feed!?

I hate to pretentiously tell you what you should think of these two points. I can only tell you what I think of these concerns myself.

Regarding the first point, discoverability is important, of course. If you publish stuff, you don't want to do that into a void, you want known and unknown people be able to read your stuff. Making the publishing technically possible is a small feat, compared to getting discovered by random people, let alone by your preferred target audience. But do you remember how you first went about Facebook and Twitter? You probably connected with some very familiar people first, and that grew because their connections reminded you of other people you also knew but forgot about initially. Or something along those lines. With my own website and timeline software, I try to imitate that 'virality' by resurrecting blog roll and web ring functionality. What better way there is to have the people you already follow recommend new interesting feeds to follow!? Back in the day, lists of feeds were transferred between people by means of an OPML file. My list of recommended feeds is clickable for my website visitors, but it's also downloadable as an OPML file. So not only my own feed is auto-discoverable from my website, but also the circle of blogs I recommend is discoverable. Even by automation. I chose to categorize this list, so if it grows into the hundreds, it still can be filtered by you for only the interesting topics.

Also regarding the first point, you don't reach millions of people on Twitter. Influencers (whatever that means), big brands and other 'paying' entities do. Which is decided by Twitter's algorithm. Their algorithm is not your algorithm, they are not even aligned for 10%, if you ask me. Whether they preach free speech or thought police, it doesn't matter, they need money quickly and they are going to do crazy things to accomplish that. And maybe you can get a clean and refreshing timeline on there, but they are not going to do it for you, it requires your work. More work than you have on curating your own timeline on your own website. The latter you can do with your own algorithm, the one inside your head. It requires some thinking and getting accustomed to a new modus operandi, but it will pay off quickly. And you have the fruits of your own labour very soon.

Lastly regarding the second point, some friends or people you will never find with their own website. You might miss out on some people if you leave 'big tech social media' (BTSM, anybody!?) behind. At least I did. There were some interesting people that only had Twitter or LinkedIn as a way of keeping me updated about their lifes and thoughts. One can choose to leave some people behind while burning a bridge, but I opted to include not only RSS feeds in my timeline, but also bookmarks to websites without a feed. This way, I still get reminded about some Twitter profiles, and I can choose to click the link to visit their Twitter profile. To be honest, I usually don't.

The best of this all is, nobody needs to build another piece of software as a solution to this 'problem'. It's already there. There are already millions of websites that have interesting feeds. Different newsreaders exist for a long time, and are battle-tested. Nobody even needs to buy my software to follow other website, you can build a Wordpress website and take a newsreader and you are good to go. I opted to combine the feed and the reader in one and the same timeline functionality, which makes it work more like the social media you are used to, but it's not necessary.

Conclusion: the open web is already 'social media'. Stop inventing problems that don't exist. Build your website with blog and feed, start collecting and curating feeds that you like, and soon you are participating on this 'old' platform that's new again.

Long live the world wide web!