I've tried using RSS readers a few times in the past. I had liked the idea of RSS but for whatever reason it never stuck. I think what tended to happen was that my reading list would get so backed up it would start to feel overwhelming. I had chosen to follow all of those feeds and felt almost an obligation to read every single post from every one. But some of them were uninteresting or otherwise I didn't have the time. The list of unread articles would grow longer and longer and eventually I just didn't want to look at it any more. This same thing happened a few times. As I write this I'm realizing that this also happens every time I try to get more organized with a new todo list.
About five years ago I started removing myself from big tech platforms as a way to take control of my information and privacy. And at the same time tech enshittification worsened more and more, so it was more incentive to stay away. I joined the fediverse with my own Mastodon instance and that's been the main way that I connect with folks online. Through Mastodon, I've found a lot of really interesting blogs. Sometimes I find the authors have a lot of interesting posts and I find myself wanting to know when they've published something new. That brought me back to RSS.
I've been using FeedFlow on Android. I didn't have a strong reason why I chose it other than it seemed simple and clean and was available from F-Droid. Previously I had used Feedly, which was nice because you could access it from anywhere. But as I mentioned, I'm trying to maintain privacy and I wanted something local. I also don't trust any tech service to allow me to easily export my information should they decide to enshittify. FeedFlow does have options to sync to a few services, but I haven't used them. I haven't had a need. These days I'm rarely at my computer unless I'm working, and in that case I have no time to sit and read long form articles. Most of the time when I want something to read its in the spare minutes between other activities in my life, which means I'm reading on my phone.
I've been using this setup for a few months now and really haven't lost interest or become overwhelmed yet. I was thinking about this earlier and wondering why I'm having success this time around, and I think there are several reasons.
First, I subscribed to a paid news publication 404 Media. I highly recommend them for tech-related journalism, by the way. This is actually what got me to start using RSS again in the first place. After subscribing, I wanted to be sure I was actually receiving the articles I was paying for. That sort of necessitated a reader because I didn't want my email inbox flooded with articles. Having this paid subscription gives me incentive to keep using the reader so I don't have to go check the website every day.
Second, I've been more particular about what I add to the reader. In the past, I've gone around searching for every blog I could find about given topics and adding them to the reader. This resulted in a ton of posts flooding in. This obviously resulted in that overwhelming feeling I described earlier. This time around, I didn't go searching out things to add to the reader. Instead, if I stumble on an article I really enjoy, I go look through the rest of the author's posts. If they have a lot of stuff that I'm interested in, then I add their feed. If they only have one or two posts I find interesting, I skip it. I'm looking for a good signal to noise ratio.
Third, I've made peace with the idea that I'm not going to read everything that shows up in the feed. I don't even want to. That's OK. The whole idea of the reader is to help me keep up to date with things that interest me. I'm not going to be interested in every post by every author. I have a finite amount of reading time available. I don't have to check off every box. There's no prize for reading everything. If a post looks interesting to me, then I read it. If not, I just mark it as read and move on. This has helped tremendously with preventing the list from growing too large.
Finally, I discovered that YouTube channels and subreddits have RSS feeds. There are two YouTube channels I follow regularly and previously I was just checking them each week myself. But the YouTube website is terrible and designed to keep you engaged by showing you rage bait and other unhealthy things. They also obviously track everything you do so they can recommend videos that are more likely to keep you from leaving the website. Subscribing via RSS means I can mostly avoid that. I don't even have to log in to YouTube. Now I know when a YouTuber I like has published new videos and I don't have to log in and subscribe through their platform. I rarely use Reddit these days aside from trying to get real reviews for products by real people, but I do follow the subreddit for my city to keep up to date with things going on around town. Now I can see what's up from my own reader instead of having to use Reddit's platform which again is tracking every click and trying to keep you from leaving the website. I may end up removing the subreddit from my feeds because there's not much signal for all the noise, however it's the best way I've found to keep up to date with certain goings on around town. Maybe I can find something better.
I have to say RSS has been excellent. It's like having the Internet your own way. You don't have to deal with all the popups and popunders and ads and other garbage. The content just comes to me in an easily digestible format. I've been reading a lot more longer form content now, which I think has been good for my attention span. It means I spend less time scrolling through Mastodon or other short form feeds.
I've posted a list of RSS feeds that I follow for anyone who may be interested. I'll try to keep it updated periodically.