Cutting out the RSS middleman
Way back when Google Reader went the way of all Google products (RIP), I ended up switching to Feedly, a web-based RSS service that had good integration with third-party clients. But this past week I decided to ditch it for good.
The truth is, I never really used Feedly’s web-based offerings, or its first-party apps on iPhone or the Mac (the latter of which was apparently quietly retired last year). Instead, I mainly used Feedly as the back-end for my RSS app of choice, Reeder.1
Lately, though, I’d noticed that certain feeds—especially those on smaller sites—just didn’t seem to update very quickly. That’s apparently by design: in part because those who paid for Feedly (which I never have) get faster updates, and in part because the polling interval seems to vary from site to site.2
Specifically I noticed that a post on my personal blog didn’t seem to be showing up, which a few people subscribed to my RSS feed let me know. That turned out to be mainly because of an issue in WordPress where my own RSS feeds were being cached, but even once I remedied that it still took a solid day for the post to show up in my own reader.
That seemed silly to me: I only subscribe to thirty-some feeds, probably about half of which are actually updated regularly, and I’d prefer for the control over when I get my items delivered to be in my own hands, not that of a middleman.
Fortunately, Reeder (like other RSS readers) at some point added the ability to subscribe to feeds within the app and have them synced between devices via iCloud. All I had to do was export the feeds from my Feedly account as an OPML file and import them into the iCloud account, something that took probably less than a minute.
It was really the simplicity of that last part that struck me: the fact that feed readers still rely on an open format that’s easily portable between apps and services. I’ve relied on RSS to do my job since I first started writing about the Mac back in the mid 2000s, and even in a world that’s become dominated by social media it’s still pretty effective. I kind of wish that other services made this kind of portability so easy and painless—after all, we should be in control of our own data, not some middleman.
I don’t want to knock Feedly here: I found their service stable and reliable for more than a decade, and not only did I not pay a dime for it, they didn’t put roadblocks in my way to leave. That’s actually pretty great, as far as service goes, and frankly I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t throw some money their way. But as the year starts off, I like the idea of removing some of the little tech annoyances that I just take as a given and seeing if I can make my life a little smoother.
- I was a longtime NetNewsWire user, and I still really like the app, but I’ve now been using Reeder for so long that it’s just the way my brain works. ↩
- Presumably this is a sort of caching system, as I imagine it doesn’t want to hit the same site x number of times for everybody in Feedly subscribed to it? ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]
If you appreciate articles like this one, support us by becoming a Six Colors subscriber. Subscribers get access to an exclusive podcast, members-only stories, and a special community.