Reading RSS

First, the obligatory: we mourn Google Reader. 🪦

For nearly two decades of reading RSS, I’d been using Feedly, as it was (originally) the only free-tier service I could find that would reliably follow me across browser & mobile (and mobile OS). Their regular exhortations to pay for their AI services (before the entire internet was choked with same) were tedious, and the helpful offers to increase my marketing reach and business understanding were a sickening concession to the grindset mindset; you really had to ignore more than half of the website to use it peacefully. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when they announced strikebreaking-as-a-service in roughly 2023.

[I don’t] think that a company that creates harmful technology should be excused simply because they’re bad at it.

I’ve been looking for a replacement since around that time.

I learned about Current somewhere along the grapevine (probably Mastodon). It promised a gentler metaphor for the RSS queue: a river that flows on without you, hiding (“Releasing”) articles automatically after some time elapsed.

It sounded fine, and the website was neat, so I decided to give it a go (though as with anything that anyone makes these days, I’m bracing for an eventual AI disclosure). I noticed that it synchronizes with Inoreader, which was another service I’d been considering as a Feedly replacement; only thing is, the free Inoreader tier maxes out at 150 feeds.

One thing I’ll give Feedly is that they’ve always have a pretty good interface for checking on your feeds’ health (though I suspect most folks have that by now). I backed up my full feed list for archival/sentimental purposes, and took out the hatchet, winnowing out anything that was expired or no longer relevant to me (remember Witty Comics? remember Boing Boing?) (Another reminder here that I’m trying to be More Intentional with what I’m ingesting.)

Anyway, after a bit of work importing everything to Current, then organizing and syncing everything with Inoreader, I’m roughly in a happy place. There are a few UI nitpicks off the top of my head:

When I “Release” an item in Current, I’d love for that same article to be marked as read in Inoreader. I Release like a dozen Al Jazeera articles an hour in Current, but they still accumulate as Unread in Inoreader, which is tedious.
I have to scroll down to scan all the articles in my news River, but then scroll all the way back to the top to view anything new that’s coming in. Not sure if that’s the intended user flow but it’s what came naturally, and it’s a bit… tedious. That word again.
A few UI glitches that I honestly sort of expect in most software these days (e.g., trying to release everything in a given current, sometimes releases everything in the previous current visited)

No deal-breakers, for sure, just things that I noticed. It’s still possible that I give up on Current and just use Inoreader exclusively, but I do appreciate that the former is a one-time purchase.

I’m not completely sold on it yet, but I think it’s perhaps healthier.