Chronological and Proud: The Americans Ditching Algorithmic Feeds for a Quieter Internet

Nadia Castillo hasn't opened Instagram in four months. Not because she deleted the app in a moment of dramatic digital detox — she still has it on her phone — but because she simply stopped needing it.

"I get my news from three newsletters, I follow about forty blogs through an RSS reader, and I check a couple of forums for the topics I actually care about," says the 29-year-old graphic designer from Portland, Oregon. "My information diet is so much better now. I know what I'm reading and why. There's no one deciding for me."

Nadia is part of a quietly growing movement that doesn't have a catchy name or a viral hashtag — which is sort of the point. Across the U.S., a scattered but increasingly visible group of internet users is walking back from algorithmically curated feeds and returning to older, more manual ways of finding content online. RSS readers. Email newsletters. Personal blogs. Link aggregators. Tools that were supposed to be relics of a pre-social-media internet are suddenly feeling relevant again.

The Thing About RSS

For anyone who came of age after Twitter, a quick explainer: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a protocol that lets you subscribe to websites and have their new content delivered to a single reader app — no algorithm, no ads, no engagement optimization. You choose the sources. The reader shows you everything they publish, in chronological order. That's it.

Google Reader, the most popular RSS application, was shut down in 2013 — a move that many internet historians cite as a turning point that pushed users toward algorithmically curated social feeds as their primary discovery mechanism. At the time, RSS felt obsolete. Why manually curate a feed when Facebook and Twitter would do it for you?

A decade later, that question has a different answer.

Apps like Feedly, Inoreader, and the open-source NewsBlur have reported steady user growth over the past two years. Feedly, which has been around since 2008, told Nieman Lab in 2023 that it had seen a meaningful uptick in new signups following major algorithm changes at Twitter and Instagram. The newer app NetNewsWire — free, open-source, and aggressively simple — has cultivated a devoted following among the tech-adjacent crowd who treat minimalism as a virtue.

"RSS is boring in the best possible way," says Marcus Webb, a software developer in Austin who runs a personal blog about urban planning and has been using an RSS reader as his primary news source since 2021. "It doesn't try to keep me on it. It doesn't reward me for spending more time. It just shows me what the people I chose to follow have written. Then I close the app and go do something else."

The Newsletter Renaissance

If RSS is the quiet choice, email newsletters are the slightly louder cousin — and they've had a very public comeback.

Substack launched in 2017 and spent several years as a niche tool for independent writers. Then something shifted. Between 2020 and 2023, the platform grew from roughly 250,000 paying subscribers across all publications to over 2 million, according to the company's own disclosures. Ghost, Beehiiv, and Buttondown have carved out their own corners of the newsletter economy. Even journalists leaving major outlets have increasingly launched newsletters as their primary publishing home.

The appeal is partly about the writer-reader relationship. An email newsletter lands directly in your inbox — it doesn't compete with viral videos or trending audio. It doesn't get buried because the algorithm decided something else was more engaging this week. You subscribed because you wanted it, and it showed up because you asked it to.

"There's something about the inbox that feels different," says Priya Subramaniam, a teacher in Minneapolis who subscribes to eleven newsletters covering topics from local politics to ceramics. "When I open a newsletter, I'm choosing to be there. When I open Instagram, I'm just... being swept along. Those are very different mental states."

For creators, the newsletter model offers something even more valuable: a direct relationship with an audience that doesn't depend on any platform's goodwill. No shadowbanning. No reach throttling. No algorithm update that cuts your distribution in half overnight.

Personal Blogs Aren't Dead — They Just Moved

And then there are the blogs.

Personal blogging was supposed to have died somewhere around 2012, killed by the convenience of posting directly to social platforms. But in the past couple of years, something has shifted. Independent bloggers are publishing again — or for the first time — and a small but enthusiastic readership has followed.

The aesthetic is deliberately low-fi. Plain HTML sites. Minimal design. Long-form writing that doesn't optimize for skimmability or mobile-first consumption. There's even a loose community around what some people call the "small web" or "indie web" — a collection of personal sites that link to each other and operate entirely outside the attention economy.

"I wanted a place where I could write something longer than a tweet and more permanent than a Story," says Dominic Farrell, a 26-year-old in Brooklyn who launched a personal blog about film and urban history in 2022. "I have maybe 400 regular readers. That feels like the right size. I'm not trying to go viral. I'm trying to actually say something."

Why Now?

The timing of this revival isn't random. It tracks almost directly with a series of platform changes that eroded user trust in algorithmic feeds.

Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in late 2022 pushed a significant number of power users off the platform entirely, forcing them to reconsider where they were getting their information. Meta's pivot to Reels-heavy content on Instagram frustrated users who preferred text and photography. TikTok's aggressive algorithmic recommendations, while effective at driving engagement, left some users feeling manipulated rather than entertained.

"I think people started to notice the feeling," says Nadia. "That specific feeling of having spent an hour scrolling and not being able to remember a single thing you actually read or watched. Once you notice it, you can't unnotice it."

Dr. James Torrance, a digital media researcher at Northwestern University, frames it in terms of agency. "Algorithmic feeds are fundamentally passive experiences. The platform decides what you see. What we're watching now is a segment of the population deciding they want an active relationship with information again. They want to choose. That impulse has always existed — it just needs the right conditions to surface."

Is This a Trend or a Movement?

Let's be honest: the people abandoning algorithmic feeds are still a small fraction of the total internet-using population. Instagram has two billion monthly active users. The entire Substack subscriber base across all publications is a rounding error by comparison.

But cultural shifts often start at the edges. And there's something notable about who's leading this one. It isn't exclusively older users retreating to familiar tools. A meaningful portion of the RSS revival crowd is under 35 — people who grew up on social media and are choosing something different not out of ignorance but out of exhaustion.

For platforms like ScrollerBase that live at the intersection of content discovery and curation, the message is worth sitting with. The appetite for finding great content hasn't gone away. What's changing is the tolerance for letting an algorithm do all the deciding.

Some people want to hold the remote themselves. Even if it means doing a little more work.