Andy's "follows" tracking

We all follow something, in some way. On the Internet, the various social media try to anchor such follows in their ecosystems aka walled gardens, and then keep feeding it to you whether you are ready for it or not. I prefer to manage when and how I consume different content, and having adopted a few strong techniques before social media hit, I'll just continue to evolve them and maintain my own control. This page is a part of my off-site backup and to share some of how I do this to help limit the tyranny of click bait and that any cloud service can be blown away with little notice, especially the "free" ones.

It stated with browser bookmarks, and they continue to be a great tool for some of this. I use them to collect a bunch of pages on a project I'm working on into a folder while on the project, as a stash spot while I figure what to do with a link, and as my daily watch list (right click, Open all Bookmarks, and there they all are). Every thing else is basically a spin off or secondary step. I make a point of keeping these local and in my own control, this being one reason that has kept Firefox my primary browser.

Link pages where something I started early on based on some of the early browser bookmark files, manually made some of my own as simple tables, and then really hit their stride with PC Magazine's Page1 tool that I continue to avidly use this all the time now and some of them have been discovered and get high hit rates. Originally they were just shared with a few clients, so clearly some of them shared them widely enough I was getting requests to add links that I had to explain them here.

RSS feeds has become my primary way of following all that I can, and have my feeds list here.

Twitch.tv is a perfect expample of how little control one has over what you follow on their platform. I have a small set of artists and authors that I like to watch when I can, but not all the time. When I miss some of them, Twitch removes their notifications that they are live.

Lemmings. In theory, we humans are smarter than they are, so who guides your follows?