Meta to start charging for "premium" features

Meta announced on May 27th that it will start providing a "premium" subscription offering across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for sub-$4 per month (for FB and IG) and sub-$3 per month for WhatsApp, to offer "extra features, like profile customization, super reactions, and story insights, among other things."

Here is what I predict will happen.

Your unpaid, basic experience will begin to be intentionally degraded significantly to induce you to start paying up. The most likely scenario is inability to control what you see on the services or being bombarded by even more unwanted nuisance advertising. "Oh, you actually have preferences about what you want to see? Pay up."

And we won't get into the fact that they are already selling your data—if the service is free, YOU are the product.

My suggestions, based on my own practice:

Use RSS/ATOM with a reader for aggregating news sites, &c. This is a service that has been around for decades and it's built into nearly every news site, personal blog, even YouTube. In fact, my own central site (swb72.us) offers RSS and JSON feeds if you scroll down to the bottom of the page. Feedly can be your friend, or there are free software versions in the form of NetNewsWire on the Apple side (iOS, macOS, and iPadOS). Everything is consolidated into one place.

Look for open-source alternatives to the corporate conglomerations. IndieWeb, Mastodon, a personal site like micro.blog that supports Micropub and syndication for a single-source endpoint of everything that is "you". Roll your own server if you're adventurous.