Combining My Feeds with Reeder

I have consistently used RSS to follow sources for almost 20 years, which is amazing to think about given that during that time:

• Social media has eclipsed RSS feeds for most people as a way to follow feeds.
• Google Reader, the most popular RSS reader (and my favourite at the time) came and died.

I continue to love RSS because, as many have observed, they are a welcome respite from algorithmically-fed content. I choose which sources to follow, and see everything those sources post in chronological order, and nothing else. If I get tired of a source, I can remove it and I’ll never see it again. This is in contrast to social media sites, where the order of items on my feed is determined by algorithm, and I’ll get pushed dumb, clickbait crap that I don’t follow.

Beyond that, I like RSS due to its openness and versatility. At its heart, RSS is structured data in a standard format that can be interpreted and displayed in lots of different ways. This versatility means it’s a fun playground for developers to come up with different models to consume and interact with RSS feeds. It’s no surprise then, that I’ve tried a ton of different RSS apps over the years.¹

I consume RSS on my iPhone and iPad, and sometimes my Mac. It used to be that you needed an RSS syncing services like Feedly or Feedbin to centrally keep track of your list of subscriptions and the read status of your items. But for a few years now, most of the RSS apps in the Apple ecosystem let you sync all that through your iCloud account.²

Even though RSS apps can have wildly different takes on typography and user interface design, most share a fundamental paradigm: unread counts. Next to your feed, or folder of feeds, or all feeds, there is a number indicating how many items are unread. By default, when you click into a folder of unread items, you’re at the top of your feed, with the latest item at the top. You then read from the top down, marking unread as you open the post or scroll through it. If you’re a well-adjusted person, this is a perfectly fine paradigm. Reader, I am not that person.

Unread counts stress me out. I see those unread counts continually pile up for post-heavy feeds and feel like I can never catch up. I sub-consciously see my unread counts as homework I needed to catch up on, and felt like I was failing because the unread counts always went up. I don’t think I even recognized this as something that bothered me until I tried a new RSS with a new paradigm for RSS, Reeder. ³

Enter Reeder #

There are two ways that Reeder handles RSS differently:

1. It remembers where you left off.
2. There are no unread counts.

Those are two simple changes that are profound in practice. Moreover, they’re intricately connected in a way that I’ll try to explain.

Let’s start with the first: remembering where you left off. Remember how I said that most feed reeders start you at the top of your feed, showing the latest item at top? Reeder starts you where you left off. If you opened Reeder and got caught up on all the items in your feed, the the latest post would be at the top. If you come back later, you’ll see that post, and there will be other posts above it. You can scroll up to see new posts, and when you come back, you’ll always be back to where you were. Your timeline position syncs through iCloud, so if you were reading on your iPhone and opened Reeder on your Mac, you’d be in the same spot where you left off.

Because Reeder remembers your position in the timeline, there isn’t any need for unread counts. If you want to see more, you scroll up to see it. If want to go back to something, you scroll down. By default, Reeder will show you a summary of a post, and you have to tap or click on it to read it. If you’re not interested in it from the summary, you scroll past it. Because it doesn’t keep track of whether you read something, you don’t (weirdly) feel guilty for scrolling past something not interesting because it didn’t decrement your unread count number.

Once I got used to it, the combination of timeline position syncing and the lack of unread counts clicked for me. I don’t get stressed out about not “doing my homework”, and I find I don’t miss things that are important to me, because I will scroll through everything eventually. For any given post, I can scroll past it, read it, or add it Reeder’s “read later” folder (or Goodlinks, my read later service of choice.)

Beyond RSS #

Reeder goes beyond RSS posts from websites in by adding support for a few different services:

1. Podcasts
2. Mastodon
3. Bluesky
4. YouTube

Reeder’s Podcasts player is surprisingly adequate, but I like listening to Podcasts in a dedicated app (Overcast). But Mastodon, Bluesky and YouTube have been welcome additions for me.

For Mastodon/Bluesky, you can add your entire account, following along everyone you follow, or single accounts that you choose. Reeder is not a full-fledged client for these services though, so you can’t favourite, boost or reply to posts (you can click through to the web interface for both and do that if you want to.) I initially tried adding my entire Mastodon and Bluesky feeds to Reeder, but found it to be too much.

But I do like to make sure I don’t miss posts from a few friends or key people across those services, and added them each as single sources to Reeder. I’ve enjoyed seeing these in my timeline because I never miss posts from key accounts that otherwise would have been missed in my busy Mastodon/Bluesky feeds.

I’ve enjoyed the YouTube integration for similar reasons. On Reeder, you can subscribe to specific YouTube channels by pasting the channel link into Reeder. Then new videos from that channel will show up in your Home feed, a dedicated “Video” feed, and its own feed. I’ve found this to be a welcome change from following my favourite channels on the YouTube app, which suffers from the same algorithmic trap that most services these do, pushing me videos I don’t follow, and even making it hard to see all the videos a channel posts on its own page.

Wish List #

There are few areas where I’d love to see Reeder evolve:

1. Let me export my list of subscriptions via OPML file.
2. iOS Shortcuts support to let me nerd out with my feeds.
3. iOS widgets.

That said, even without those, I’ve been really happy with Reeder and can see it sticking with me for a long time to come.