Even though the Friendly Social Browser has been a big step in the right direction for me, it doesn't do everything I want in terms of simplifying and streamlining the way I consume content. It's still kind of cluttered and disjointed, and it only supports a handful of social media sites. I'm finding that I use Friendly mostly for Facebook, because Facebook is especially difficult to access from outside of its own walls, and there really aren't many third-party tools available for it.
For many other content sources, though, there are more options. Many websites and blogs provide feeds in RSS format, which is widely supported by many reader/aggregator tools. Some of these tools can also harvest data from other popular sites even if they don't provide RSS. One example is 1feed.app. This web app provides both free and premium subscriptions, and it presents a minimalist view of feeds that you select, with intuitive touch gestures for navigation on phones and tablets. I used it for quite a while and liked it a lot.
More recently, though, I've found a couple of free, open-source programs that I like even better. The reader that I'm using now is called FreshRSS, and it does a lot of the same things that 1feed does, but with source code that I can customize to even more effectively meet my specific needs. An important pairing with FreshRSS is rss-bridge, which helps to connect content from sources like Twitter and Youtube that don't provide RSS but can be fairly easily converted.
With this killer combination, I now have a unified and consistent way to access news and updates from potentially hundreds of different sources, neatly sorted and categorized so that I can prioritize the content I want to see first, free from distracting ads and click-bait, and searchable, so I can go back and find that interesting article from a few days ago, even if I can't remember where I saw it. Instead of getting sucked into infinite-scrolling through multiple algorithm-controlled eye-candy rabbit holes I can skim through my feeds a couple times a day, and then get on with actual living.
Feels good.