You’ve likely heard me go on about how much I like an encourage using an RSS reader.
What if you could take all your favorite newsletters, ditch the data collection, and curate your own newspaper? It could include independent journalists, bloggers, mainstream media, worker-owned media collectives, and just about anyone else who publishes online. Even podcast episodes, videos from your favorite YouTube channels, and online forum posts could slot in, too. Only the stuff you want to see, all in one place, ready to read at your convenience. No email notifications interrupting your peace (unless you want them), no pressure to read articles immediately. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Here are a few more reasons:
- It’s fun to experiment with different RSS readers. Exploring different UI/UX like a new playground. I like switching up the fonts, colors, etc in use in different readers litreally just for kicks.
- You can heart/star/favorite things, which is a very quick way to get back to things you could tell in the moment you wanted to remember.
- Bigger workflows can be built around RSS as it’s open technology.
- You can visit the website directly still anyway. I often perfer to. It’s a click away.
- Like Molly says, it’s not just certain nerds with RSS feeds, it can be newsletters, saved posts from anywhere, podcasts, etc.
I could keep going listing reasons and resources and yadda yadda, but right now, I’m thinking about the pushback. Why would someone not do this? Tell me! I’m curious.
I know one pushback I’ve recently heard is that it’s easy to screw up. For instance, you’re like: I like The Verge. So you subscribe to The Verge RSS feed, and then only like a handful of other things. The Verge publishes a lot so now everytime you visit your reader, it’s all Verge stuff, and you just get sick of it in 2 days. That feels very fair. You gotta unsubscribe from that if that’s how you feel. It’s constantly work to curate your feeds so it’s a nice pace for you an a nice collection of stuff you actually do want to read. That’s work and not everyone wants work. They don’t want another inbox to manage, which is fair.
If you don’t do the RSS thing, what are your reasons?
Hard co-sign. After some years away from the RSS mines, the collapse of Twitter was a great motivator to get NetNewsWire set up again.
Love me some NetNewsWire! Been using “Unread” on desktop on my main desktop machine just for fun. Has a nice feature were if the article is obviously mainly a link to another article, it goes and gets it and puts it below.
IMO the solution is RSS (etc) readers with recommendation/algorithmic filtering built in. Recommendation gets a bad rap, but IMO the root problem is more the incentives of large companies/lack of competition. Having a bunch of different algorithmic RSS readers built by individuals/small-to-medium sized companies seems like it would be pretty great? (And yes, I happen to be building one of those, how did you guess…)
I guess bluesky is relevant here with their pluggable algorithms. I just haven’t been able to get into the whole tweet-sized content thing since the Twitter apocalypse.
“You can visit the website directly still anyway. I often perfer to. It’s a click away.”
My current workflow with Inoreader is to show direct link instead of reader mode. I like read directly from the source.
Regarding the issue with fast feeds you pointed out, I selfhost Miniflux as my RSS backend, and I love that it has a setting in each feed to hide its entries in the global unread list. With that, my unread list is just the important stuff, but if I want to skim the headlines of the Verge and such, I can just click into the category I put those fast feeds into.