Before RSS readers were mass-market products, there were link blogs. One person read a lot, found the things worth reading, and pointed at them. You read what they found. If you trusted how they found things, you kept reading.
When platforms scaled, they replaced the pointing with personalization. The feed stopped being chronological and started being ranked. Ranked by what you'd already clicked. By what people like you clicked. By what kept you on the platform longest. Every feed converged on the same things. Not because everyone was interested in them. Because they got clicked on. You'd open three different apps and find the same story, the same take, the same argument running on a loop.
The people who've moved away from algorithmic feeds describe the same thing: a mix of newsletters, podcasts, group chats, a few social platforms that still show posts in order. Bespoke. Built up over time.
It takes work because the default now is the ranked feed. Chronological is the exception. Choosing your own sources is the exception. The platforms made the opposite feel like the natural state of things.
Slow Web channels are chronological. No ranking, no weighting, no algorithm deciding which articles to surface. You add a channel, an RSS feed built around a topic or a sensibility, and you get what was published, in the order it was published. You can build your own channels, share them, remix ones other people made, cull the ones that stopped earning their place.