The Feed Is Not the Public Square

Availability is not attention

Publishing something and having it distributed are not the same act. A page can be public, technically accessible and faithfully preserved—and still be seen by very few people. A feed can place a post before millions without making the publisher responsible for the rules that determine its reach.

That distinction sounds obvious until “the internet” is treated as one room. It is not. A website, a search engine, a social feed, a recommendation system and a messaging group are different routes with different gates. The public square metaphor hides the machinery.

Distribution has rules

Platforms describe their own systems as selecting and ranking content using signals about relevance and user interests. Meta’s explanations, for example, describe ranking and recommendation processes that use information about user activity and apply separate eligibility guidelines to recommendations. Those are platform descriptions, not an independent audit of every ranking decision.

Research on digital news has also separated publishing, sharing by social actors and algorithmic spreading as distinct gatekeeping processes. A study of Australian news professionals described platform dependency as a real concern while cautioning that its extent and form vary. That scholarship does not prove that every small publisher is dependent in the same way. It gives us a useful frame for asking who controls each route to readers.

The argument here is that platform distribution is a form of private infrastructure for public attention. It can widen discovery, connect a specialist article to an interested reader and reduce the cost of reaching people. It can also change its rules, rankings or eligibility standards without the independent publisher controlling the result.

The strongest counterargument

There is a fair response: no publication has ever had a right to every reader’s attention. Editors choose what to print; bookstores decide what to stock; readers decide what to open. Platforms are allowed to curate, and recommendation systems can help people find material they would not otherwise encounter. Their rules may also limit material they consider harmful or low quality.

That is true—and it is why the point is not that every ranking decision is censorship or that platforms should distribute every post equally. Curation has value. A private service can set rules for its own product.

But the existence of curation does not erase the difference between “I published this” and “the platform chose to recommend this.” When a publisher’s public reach depends heavily on an intermediary, visibility becomes contingent on rules that may be opaque, changing or optimized for goals other than the publisher’s editorial purpose. A careful debate should name that dependency without pretending the publisher owns the audience.

Independence is a practice, not a slogan

A small publication cannot force distribution. It can, however, build direct routes: a stable website, RSS feeds, searchable archives, email subscriptions where appropriate, and links that readers can share. These routes do not guarantee reach. They reduce the number of single points of dependence and make the work easier to find outside a particular feed.

That independence also has a cost. Direct discovery is slower and requires readers to seek the publication out. Platform reach can introduce unfamiliar work to people who were not already looking. The practical choice is not “platforms or purity.” It is whether a publication understands what each channel contributes and avoids mistaking algorithmic exposure for ownership of a public.

The feed is not the public square because it is a privately designed route through attention, not the whole public. Publishing is the act of making work available. Distribution is the contested process that may carry it to others. Keeping those two ideas separate is not anti-platform; it is the beginning of editorial clarity.