This is a solution for getting away from Facebook, but it neglects the problem of news discovery. Unless you don't care about finding interesting things that aren't available from your choices of news sources, you're going to miss out on things that folks in your social circle find and want to share. To me, that's the value of a social network. At the very least, it doesn't really make RSS an alternative to Facebook, it serves a different purpose. The folks that the article mentions who rely on Facebook as their exclusive source of messaging are already relying on news discovery, since a story is either shared by a friend or promoted to you as an ad.