Earlier I mentioned that I was looking to the venerable RSS feed as a way to keep up with the internet without all the negatives of social media apps.
For a long time, I’ve been a huge fan of Silvio Rizzi’s Reeder app for the iPhone and especially the iPad. It’s so thoughtfully and artfully designed, with lots of attention devoted to choosing exactly the right colors and typography, that it actually seemed to elevate everything I read on it.1Rizzi’s Mela app brings the same excellent design to a recipe manager.
The original Reeder app has been rebranded as Reeder Classic, while the new version has been dramatically redesigned to support a much wider variety of feeds. In addition to the sites you follow via RSS, you can also add YouTube, Podcasts, Flickr photos, comic strips, and even Bluesky or Mastodon if that’s your thing.
I tried the new version and quickly bounced off of it. It (wisely) didn’t mess with anything that made the original so great for RSS, and I didn’t see the value of adding podcasts or YouTube, which I’m always going to prefer having in a dedicated app. I was happy to go back to the classic app — which is still a one-time charge, somehow — and read the web as Al Gore intended.
Since my current social media vacation has left me occasionally jonesing for an infinitely-scrolling list of new content to look at, I decided to try the new version of Reeder again and give it another chance to win me over.
I paid the subscription fee to allow me to import my entire list of ~150 RSS feeds to the new app. It’s only $10 a year, which is so low that it’s kind of obnoxious that I initially was resistant to pay it, especially since I’ve said in the past that I like Reeder Classic so much that I wished there were a way to pay more to support its continued development and maintenance.
With my entire feed list in place2Except for the news sites, because it’s 2025 and I’m still actively keeping my head in the sand, plus a few of my favorite YouTube channels, the app makes sense now. I’d initially thought that the appeal of the new version of Reeder was the greater variety of disparate feeds, but it’s actually the other big change that makes the biggest difference.
Instead of the traditional RSS reader model, of syncing with a server to get all of the updates and presenting them as lists that can be filtered, the new Reeder treats your various feeds more like the original Twitter model.3Original since it’s strictly chronological, and there’s no algorithm determining what gets into your timeline. It’s a chronological list, always centered on your current spot in the timeline. Scroll down to see the older entries, scroll up to see the new stuff. A small unread counter in the upper right corner of the feed shows you how many newer entries are available.
It seems like such a subtle change, but it makes a dramatic difference. As much as I like the original app, I’ve gotten out of the habit of using it for various reasons. It felt like yet another email inbox that was perpetually filling up, and I would quickly get overwhelmed if I didn’t check everything daily. The initial sync was always time-consuming, as it downloaded content for everything in my (over-large) feed list.4I’d stopped using third-party services like Feedly in favor of just letting Reeder sync over iCloud, which accounts for part of the slowness. And a lot of blogs have reduced excerpts available on the RSS feed, requiring you to go back to the main site to read the whole thing.
That last one hasn’t changed, and there’s not much to be done about that. (It makes sense that people want to direct you back to their site, to see the content presented as it was originally intended, if not just to give potential add/engagement revenue). But the others don’t apply to the new model.
Most obviously, going to a more original-Twitter-like model has the same benefit as the original Twitter, which is there’s always new stuff to read. The more subtle but impactful difference is that it makes the feeds feel as ephemeral as posts on a micro-blogging platform. Having a bloated email inbox feels stressful, since I need to address everything in there, even if only to delete it or mark it as spam. Presenting the feeds as an infinitely-scrolling timeline means that I don’t need to care about an unread count, since I don’t need to read everything.
Rizzi has said that he gave the name “Reeder” to the redesigned app, instead of coming up with a new name, because he was making the app that he personally wanted to use. I admired that a lot, even when I thought that this wasn’t the app I personally wanted to use. Somebody making software to solve a problem, and designing it to suit themselves first, feels almost old-fashioned at this point. But now that I’ve got a way to satisfy my Urge To Keep Scrolling, in a way that’s leading to more long-form content on platforms that people control themselves, it feels like getting the app I didn’t even know I wanted.
I was pleasantly reading along and then saw my post! That reminds me, I need to figure out a way to rework my RSS to have both a full and excerpted feeds.
That aside, I feel like I need to give Reeder another try as I’d like to peruse feeds on devices other than my laptop. I just need to make a new workflow for saving things for later. My current approach is dumb — I mark things as unread.
I should’ve mentioned that Reeder (both versions) is also available on MacOS; it’s not just for iPad and iPhone. As you’d expect from that developer, it works seamlessly and maintains your progress across every device.
I’m still not sure that it’ll be perfect for everyone, because a big part of the appeal is just accepting that you probably won’t (and don’t need to) read every single entry in your feeds. But I was already having to declare RSS bankruptcy every so often, so it’s all right. The downside is that even posters who make a new entry every day will get lost amidst the sites that are publishing multiple times a day. I’d actually missed your posts about the Kim Deal concert, and I wouldn’t have seen them unless I’d specifically gone through personal blogs looking for screenshots!
And having an option for full and excerpted posts would be excellent, although like I mentioned absolutely not a requirement, since I completely understand why people would want readers to be directed back to their full site. But it’s actually your blog that prompted the comment! (I swear I wasn’t sub-posting though!) Having to make an extra click to read the entire post is hardly onerous, and I think I’ll survive through it, but it is that tiniest bit of extra friction when I’m trying to get caught up.
One thing I just noticed that’s in the new Reeder but not the old version: each post adds a “Reader View” button after the excerpt, that shows the full content within the app instead of a separate web view. So it’s pretty painless now to see the full post even if the feed contains excerpts only.