I’ve recently changed RSS tools again. It wasn’t because my old setup stopped working, but because my RSS client of choice, Reeder, has pivoted to be, well, something else. There’s still Reeder Classic but it’s not being well maintained at this point. It was time to move on.
After a lot of trial and error I settled on Unread as my feed reader. It works well, though I still prefer Reeder back in its prime. Unread does have one feature I haven’t seen in years, though: a free syncing service that not only works, but works well. It works so well, in fact, that I decided it was time to drop Feedbin, which had been syncing Reeder for me for the last few years. It’s been a great combination.
When I switched I also decided it was time to start my feed subscriptions over, since it had been a while and I was subscribing to literally hundreds of feeds, most of which I no longer found relevant.
Today I’ve got a few dozen feeds in Unread, and it has reminded me of just how much I appreciate RSS feeds, and why I bothered with all this switching in the first place.
Sure, I could get my news through social media, wading through AI slop and rage bait to find it, but why?
The truth is I don’t need 1,000 sources, and I definitely don’t need to find out what’s trending for everyone else (or even anyone at all). What I don’t want is to get sucked into rabbit holes of topics I don’t care about.
What I need is to keep up with the few sites that are important to me and RSS is still the best tech to do that.
Thankfully, most content management systems, including WordPress and Hugo, publish their content in RSS format, and it’s easy for readers to find the feed (at least in most cases). All that’s left is to find the reader that works for you and paste in the URL of the site you want to subscribe to.
So if you’re stuck in algorithmic hell, tired of the endless scrolling, the AI slop and the rage bait, dust off an RSS client and add the sites you care about. If you’re like me it might just restore your faith in the web.