I’m not judging anyone for not knowing the risks of algorithmic news, and I get how we got there. Journalism as a whole changed by it, so many news articles are engagement bait now. It’s becoming so hard to find uplifting news, that’s why I liked reddit and now lemmy too. People make a genuine effort to find uplifting news.
Diversification has always been the answer, proven by a second uprising of RSS.
I’d add that Social Media kind of took over this role for most regular users
I agree, and that fact scares me tbh. But that’s more of a privacy concern with social media and less an adventage of RSS. Some RSS feeds do require you to click through for the full article, having another opportunity for tracking.
RSS feeds are a way to aggregate articles from many websites all in one feed. There’s no inherite privacy advantages. The main advantage is you can group many RSS feeds into your preferred categories and see a list of all the articles of your interests, without having to visit each website separately.
You can start here, a currated list of many feeds. I use Feeder on android and FreshRSS as a self-hosted curration tool but also to connect RSS feeds to services of mine.
It doesn’t have to know, the processed data that is regulated is about much more than just our participation in the Fediverse. Like ip’s, analytical, usage data and so on, things that are only shared between you and your lemmy instance. That’s what’s awesome about self hosting.
Participation could fall under the same laws as email, all the other data is yours. And as another user suggested, self hosting your instance and currating federation is probably fine. I’m not a lawyer this is not legal advice
Floss, drink water and live active!