RSS in 2026

It has been a while since I’ve written about RSS but Glenn’s post over on SixColors was a nice walk down memory lane.

Despite the gap, I’ve written 149 posts on this blog with some mention of RSS but I can tell you that within a year of getting my first modern Mac in 2002, I was subscribed to RSS feeds via the app NetNewsWire. That’s probably 25 years as an RSS user with the only breaks being days where I wasn’t near a computer to refresh my feeds. I used to sync everything locally and then I moved to some hosted services like Google Reader, FeedBin and NewsGator. A couple of years ago, Reeder for Mac added support for RSS sync via iCloud (CloudKit) and since I never know where I’ll refresh my feeds, just like I jumped at the opportunity to move my mail POP accounts over to IMAP 25+ years ago, I love the iCloud sync because I can read my feeds on Mac, iPad and iPhone using the same app without having to see things I’ve already read.

Doing something consistently for 25 years and I’m included to assume I’ve made advances in this process but I haven’t. I’ve been treating RSS like an Email Inbox the entire time. My feed reader refreshes every 30 minutes on 90 or so RSS feeds and 4-5 times a day, I judiciously scroll with my arrow keys automatically marking things as read that are of no interest or have already been covered earlier on another blog. If something is of interest, I read it in the RSS reader because I don’t have any feeds that post excerpts. Excerpt feeds get pruned and I’m not sympathetic on removing them. If something is too long to read in a minute or two and I’m interested in it, it gets marked as unread. If it’s night time and I still don’t have time to read it and I’m in bed, I’ll move it over to Instapaper and read it within a month or when I’m next on a long plane ride and need to spend an hour on long-form journalism.

RSS pruning begins in bed and ends in bed and I end every day with 0 unread items.

Screen Time tells me across all devices, I spend 2.5 hours each week in my RSS reader and I’m kept informed of most anything I could be interested in from a news perspective. Why I’m not optimizing by using services that curate my fees, bubble up things of importance or omit items already covered is because I don’t need it. I use RSS every single day and I’m spending 30 minutes to stay on top of 90 feeds that are news, tech, personal blogs and gadget reviews with another 60 minutes a week in Instapaper.

I also don’t really care about the software that delivers these feeds to me. I like Reeder because I like Bionic Reeding. It’s easier on the eyes for me and is a feature on all of the devices that support Reeder. I’m using Reeder Classic by the way because none of the new curated features appeal to me. I’d gladly switch to anything else that had Bionic Reeding but I suspect it’s just something I’ll have to live without at some point once Reeder classic stops working. Here’s how bionic reading looks to me:

This is a very good question, because about 15 years  ago, there was lots of momentum behind electric motorcycles. Chip Yates was pushing his electric musclebike up Pikes Peak, trying to set new records. Zero kept releasing new models with more and more capability, new exciting marques like Brammo, Mission and Lightning were coming out all the time, and eventually we got Victory and Harley-Davidson involved at the OEM level, while Alta Motors showed up as a strong niche  off-road company. In 2020, Damon launched with much hoopla and boasted bold performance targets that would establish them as an elite manufacturer.

I copied that right from Reeder.app. Annoying? Not to me. I love how it looks with a pure black background and white text.

Some people get stress or anxiety about having a notification but when I get about 85 articles per day in my RSS reader and 35 emails that are mostly inform messages from my co-workers on project updates (I send 5-15 emails a day), my workflow and RSS usage being completely non-curated or algorithmic is completely fine.

As long as CMS Operators continue to leave that RSS option checked by default (most have no idea it even exists as a feature), I’ll continue to slurp up content via RSS and read it on my Apple devices in a flat, on-demand way. I’ve gone from syncing locally to relying on a lot of now defunct cloud providers to now syncing locally again with read/unread status captured and stored on iCloud. It works really well.

Speaking of the complete lack of awareness that RSS is a thing, I love that I get to enjoy the web an a completely ad-free way. Some places were injecting ads into their RSS feeds but now that the technology is completely on-by-default on WordPress which powers 80% of the web and the audience is so small that no one is thinking about RSS-Ads, I am also completely immune to the crappy web experience. I’ll also say that there area. lot of subscription services that charged me for an ad-free, full-text RSS feed between 1 and 10 years ago that I stopped paying for at some point and they’ve yet to turn off my private member-only feed. If they turn it off, that’s fine but most of them haven’t so it’s like I’m in this special club of 10,000 people on the web actually using these tools.

Unless something superior comes along or WordPress deprecates RSS, I can’t imagine a time where I’ll ever use another method to read the news. No algorithms, no ads, no visual complexities or navigation. I just open Reeder on my iPhone and scroll through the news.

RSS is really the best.