How we interact with the internet is a very personal thing. In my life I find that the more time I spend on sites that aggregate content, such as social media, a few things happen: I find new content that is great, new content that’s terrible, I waste a lot of time, and I feel depressed. The happy medium I’ve found is using RSS feeds to aggregate content myself. This gives me most of the benefits with fewer of the downsides.
Enter Reeder 5. Reeder is an RSS feed reader app for the Apple ecosystem. It has apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Syncing works through your iCloud account. This means you can read some articles on your phone, then on your Mac you can pick up at the next unread article.
If you’re new to RSS feeds you’ll need an additional tool in order to get value out of Reeder. You can set up a free account on a service like Feedly and start searching for and adding RSS feeds to it. Then in Reeder use the Add Account function to add your Feedly feeds. In this workflow Reeder is simply the place you do your reading and curating the feeds is done in Feedly.
If you already have a list of the RSS feeds you can directly import them to Reeder and use it for both curation and reading. I’ve used RSS for a few years and have gotten pretty good at curating my feeds. Having the feeds in Reeder directly (rather than in Feedly or another service) means that I can easily add or delete feeds as I need to.
This may sound like a lot of work. The benefits of RSS are worth it. Imagine reading articles from your favorite sites as they are published without having to go to the sites. They show up in the font you want, the size you want, in the colors you want.
This is the ultimate in personalized internet content. You are in control of what you decide to read, on your schedule, without any invasive tracking or annoying ads.
In recent months I’ve also started to add Twitter feeds to Reeder so I can read tweets without having to go to Twitter. Twitter removed the native RSS feed function years ago, but you can use a service like RSSHub to create a feed and then add it to Reeder. Again, I get the content while controlling the medium and minimizing the downsides of social media.
This blog has RSS too! If you decide to use Reeder or another RSS app, you can add this blog to your feeds by adding the link https://adamtervort.com/feed.xml