Ways of RSSeeing

The still small voice of RSS feeds emitting from personal websites is my favorite part of the web. The acts of expression and bids for connection that made the early 2000s web fun are still present, they’re just drowned in the volume of commercial adaptations. You’ve gotta work harder to find the signal and drown the noise, but the dream of the 2000s is alive in hypertext.

I’ve been enjoying two experimental RSS readers.

• Reeder reimagines RSS feeds as a social media timeline. Working through items like an email inbox is replaced with scrolling through timelines.
• Current leans hard into a metaphor of content flowing by in rivers and streams. There’s still marking things read, but the key interaction is releasing content from the body of work. Optimizing for flow.

Both of these apps drop the notion of unread counts, which is a welcome omission. I jump into RSS feeds to graze for interesting ideas, not to manufacture a todo list. When I was building an indie RSS reader a few years ago, that was my key design decision. Even though that ambition stalled, it’s nice to see that leaning validated in emerging alternatives.

This is what I love about simple and stable protocols. When the means of exchange are agreed upon, the receiver is free to interpret the payloads in new and interesting ways. There are many ways to see the world (wide web). Agreement on protocols enables wild experimentation in both production and interpretation.

I’m guessing we’ll see an abundance of slop apps in this space in the coming months and years. And we’ll engage in a higher order task of separating the noise of abundant tools to find the signal of an RSS reader that niches down on a reading experience that matches the reader. Both the means of production (ai slop content) and the means of distribution (ai slop reader applications) are being accelerated and amplified. Is there any audio engineering tool that handles over-amplification? Gain? Compression? The core need remains making meaningful connections with other human beings.

Anyway, if you’re into RSS feeds, maybe give these two readers a shot.