I miss Google Reader.

That probably dates me, but I don’t care. Google Reader was one of those tools that fundamentally changed how I engaged with the internet. It made aggregation effortless. Find a good source, add it with a click, and suddenly everything you cared about was in one place. When Google shut it down in 2013, I was genuinely upset at losing something that had become essential to how I kept up with the world.

The need for that kind of tool hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s become more pressing. We’re drowning in information scattered across hundreds of websites, all competing for our attention. Social media promises to solve this problem, but really it’s just replaced one challenge with another: instead of visiting a million sites, we’re now at the mercy of algorithms optimized for engagement rather than our actual interests.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) readers offer a different path. I’ve been using NetNewsWire for years now, and it’s become as fundamental to my daily routine as email or a web browser. It quietly does exactly what I need it to do, then gets out of the way.

On any given day, I scan through 150 to 200 posts. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but I don’t read them all. I scan. The headlines, the sources, the opening lines. I’m looking for the pieces that grab me, that seem worth my time and attention.

This has become my go-to activity for low-focus periods. When I’m on a break from intense work and need a mental palate cleanser, I open NetNewsWire. When I’m eating lunch at my desk and the Middle School Minecraft club is meeting across the hall (so deep focus work is off the table anyway), I scan my feeds. Before bed, when I want something engaging but not demanding, there it is on my iPad, synced perfectly via iCloud with everything I saw on my Mac earlier in the day.

What enables this is complete control. Over the years, I’ve curated this collection of sources carefully. I follow publications I trust, bloggers whose perspectives I value, and news sources from different parts of the world. When a source starts pumping out too much content or drifts away from relevance, I remove it. When I discover something new and compelling, I add it. The process is organic, shaped entirely by what serves me.

The feeds themselves give me access to high-quality sources across topics I care about: news, technology, education, cultural commentary, long-form journalism. I’m not waiting for an algorithm to decide what I should see. I’m just reading what the sources I’ve chosen to follow have published.

Beyond the personal productivity benefits, I’ve found an unexpected way this setup strengthens my connections with others. I’m constantly coming across articles, essays, or pieces of news that make me think of someone specific. A friend who’s passionate about a particular topic, a colleague working through a similar challenge, someone who would just get a kick out of a specific perspective.

When it comes to sharing, however, frequency and relevance matter more than enthusiasm. I’ve been on the receiving end of people sending me a constant stream of links that didn’t really connect with my interests. They meant well, but it felt more like noise than connection.

So I’ve developed a system. When I see something that feels perfect for someone, I forward it to my own inbox first. I let it sit there for a bit. This gives me time to make sure it really is as relevant as I initially thought. Then I’m careful about frequency. Maybe one or two shares a month to any particular person. And most importantly, I almost never follow up. No “did you read it?” or “what did you think?” If they engage with it, great. If they don’t, that’s fine too. I’ve let them know I was thinking about them.

This approach has turned sharing through my RSS reader into a genuine way to maintain connections. Low-pressure, thoughtful, and useful.

There’s something more fundamental here than just personal productivity. We’re in an era where so much of the web has become closed. Walled gardens dominate our online experience. The content we see is determined by platforms whose primary goal is keeping us engaged, and engagement has consistently been shown to spike with content that triggers negative emotions: fear, outrage, anger, vulnerability.

RSS represents the opposite approach. It’s an open standard, free to use, and free to publish. I can follow the BBC right alongside individual bloggers. Small independent voices have the same technical standing as massive publications. Nobody has to pay a gatekeeper to reach subscribers. Nobody’s optimizing my feed for engagement metrics.

This is the same magic that powers email. It’s so ubiquitous that we don’t even think about it, but email is another open, portable standard. Nobody owns email. No company can decide to stop supporting it or change the rules. That’s why newsletters work so well: everyone has email, and it doesn’t matter which email provider you use.

RSS feeds work the same way. The feeds are portable. If I decided tomorrow that I didn’t like NetNewsWire anymore, I could export my entire list of subscriptions and import it into a different reader. The feeds themselves don’t change. The content creators don’t have to do anything differently. I just move to a different tool and keep going.

In a web that’s increasingly locked down and controlled by algorithms, RSS readers offer something increasingly rare: genuine autonomy over your information consumption.

Getting Started

If this sounds useful, here’s the good news: getting started is straightforward.

Choose Your Reader:

For Mac/iOS users:

  • NetNewsWire - Free, open-source, syncs via iCloud. This is what I use and recommend.

For Windows/Linux users:

  • RSS Guard - Free, cross-platform, feature-rich with strong support for both basic and advanced needs
  • Thunderbird - If you already use it for email, it handles RSS feeds too

For Android users:

  • Feeder - Free, open-source, clean interface
  • Feedly - Web-based with mobile apps, free for up to 100 sources
  • Inoreader - Free for up to 150 subscriptions (with ads)

Start Simple:

Begin with sources you already read regularly. Most sites that offer RSS feeds will have a link somewhere, often in the footer or on their about page. Many readers (including NetNewsWire) will let you just paste in the homepage URL and figure it out from there.

Add five to ten sources to start. Get comfortable with how the reader works, how often these sources publish, and whether their content matches what you’re looking for. You can always add more later.

Find Your Rhythm:

Figure out when RSS reading fits naturally into your day. For me, it’s breaks and transitions. For you, it might be morning coffee or an evening wind-down. The key is fitting it into your life rather than treating it like another obligation.

Pay attention to quantity. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the volume, you’ve added too much. If you’re rarely finding things worth reading, maybe you need to branch out. The goal is sustainability: a collection you genuinely want to engage with regularly.

Stay Flexible:

Your feed collection should evolve. Sources that were perfect six months ago might not serve you anymore. New publications emerge. Your interests shift. That’s fine. RSS readers offer trivially easy ways to add and remove sources. Use that flexibility.

If you’re not using an RSS reader, I’d encourage you to try one. Give it a few weeks, not just a day or two. See if it changes how you engage with information online and gives you back some control over your attention.

If you’re already reading articles like this, you’re probably exactly the kind of person who would benefit from RSS. The sources you care about likely offer feeds. The readers are free and well-supported. The only thing standing between you and a better information diet is setting it up.

And when you do, you’ll be participating in one of the rare corners of the internet that still works the way the web was supposed to work: open, portable, user-controlled. That’s worth something all on its own.