Imagine if there was a way to follow new posts and articles from almost any website or blog. Guess what? It's already here: RSS.

Facebook has added new settings to customize your News Feed to offer the simplest, most understandable view of all: a timeline view. The new view is already available on the Android app and is coming to iOS soon. The new view sorts updates chronologically. It seems ridiculous that this isn’t already the default on Facebook and Twitter, but if you don’t like it, there’s already a better way.

"RSS reading has the traditional values of the Internet: it's decentralized and no one controls it," Brent Simmons, creator of the influential news reader app NetNewsWire, told Lifewire via email. "Importantly, RSS readers don't tend to optimize for engagement, which means they don't contribute to the democracy-killing trend toward extremism that Facebook and the like do."

Google Reader started in 2005 and was discontinued in 2013. With Reader, you could follow updates from almost any site on the web. You just clicked a button on a page and it was added to your Reader. Then, all new posts from those sites would appear directly and automatically in Reader, sorted into folders or tagged. It was great, popular, and completely open. And, amazingly, it’s still possible today.