A Trickle, Not a River

There’s renewed excitement around RSS these days, which is great to see.

Terry Godier received lots of well-deserved attention for the new app Current and its approach to the “river of news”. Manton Reece has also recently released a beta of Inkwell, as his take on a modern RSS reader. Having tried Inkwell out for a few days, there’s a lot to like here too. The emphasis is on what is new today or in the past few days without any unread counts. Then there’s a “fading” tab for older items that includes an AI generated summary for recent posts in each feed, along with an option to receive a weekly email with these summaries. As a companion to Micro.blog, there’s also great integration with blogging that looks compelling.

My approach to news has been different. I’ve tried to minimize the number of feeds, newsletters, podcasts, and other inputs that I’m subscribed to. This is much more of a trickle and I have no issues with keeping up. I augment this with a subscription to The Economist as my main source of general news. Each day they highlight a few different articles from the weekly issue, along with a daily summary of major events. I appreciate that The Economist has a broad, international perspective and many clever writers. They also seem fond of Mark Carney, so Canada has shown up fairly frequently in their reporting.

I’ve been using Reeder as my integrated source for everything: RSS feeds, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube subscriptions, and the Micro.blog timeline. Having just one app for all of this has been satisfying and, I believe, reduces distractions from bouncing around among apps. Reeder is really well designed and has an often used swipe gesture to mark an item for reading later. My usual morning routine is to scroll through the inbox, sending interesting items to Later, and then reading through these later in the day. Opening up the app just a few times a day is plenty for keeping up.

Despite all of this, I’m going to try using Inkwell for a few weeks. I like Manton’s overall approach and the integration with Micro.blog. A good test of success will be if I find myself posting to my blog more frequently, thanks to this integration. I’m also going to experiment with also following the blogs of many people whose social feeds I’m following. This has been an area of friction in my approach. I have a mix of RSS and social feeds from the same people that often overlap. Switching to Inkwell for these might help.

After a few weeks I’ll have a much better sense of if this approach is working. Easy enough to go back to my old ways, if not. I think it helps to experiment with different tools and approaches every once in a while. As long as I don’t forget my general principles: subscribe to just a few, high-quality sources, based on my interests. There are many things I’d rather be doing than refreshing my news feeds.