You don't own your reading list. You rent it.

Here is an uncomfortable one: you do not own your reading list. You rent it.

Every "follow" button you have pressed in the last decade put your reading relationship inside a company's database, where it can be ranked, throttled, or ended the day the business model changes. You did not sign anything. You just stopped owning it.

It was not always like this. Feeds were the quiet machinery that kept the web interoperable. RSS and Atom meant a site, a reader, and a robot could all agree on the same stream without asking anyone's permission. You published once, and anything could read it: whatever app, whatever order, no algorithm in the middle.

Then it eroded. Plenty of sites ship no feed at all now, and "follow us" quietly became "create an account on someone else's platform."

The reason is not mysterious. Platforms had every incentive to close the loop, because a feed lets you leave, and an account does not. So the industry swapped "here is my stream, read it however you like" for "log in to see updates," and a generation of sites simply stopped publishing feeds, because the platform was where the audience was.