Back to RSS

After Google decided to kill Google Reader, I briefly moved to Feedly, which was fine, but for reasons I’ve forgotten, I eventually decided to move away from it.

About five or six years ago, I chose to use iCloud to manage my RSS feed on Reeder and NetNewsWire, hoping for some convenience in managing my RSS feed. Unfortunately it’s been an extremely frustrating ride.

While it’s fine on macOS, the aggressive restrictions on background activity for apps on iOS meant that it never completed syncing, even when I had background app refresh turned on.

I guess I could have gone back and made do with Feedly’s free plan, or stumped up some cash for Feedbin, but inertia made me stay on iCloud, and usually just read on macOS. I could have just managed two separate local feeds on iOS and macOS, but I do like my feeds kept in sync, especially the read status.

Eventually with social media content and doomscrolling habits took over, I started to forget to revisit my favourite sites.

Fortunately, as I’ve recently been putting some spit and polish on this site, I figured that since the VPS is already humming along, I’d add a dockerized instance of FreshRSS on it to handle the feed fetching.

On a technical level, it’s worked wonderfully well. It took my Hermes Agent all of 5 mins to get it installed and another 5 minutes for me to configure it on my devices. Now all my feeds sync within seconds of me launching NetNewsWire, and I’m happy again.

After constantly seeing the soulless “professional” posts in LinkedIn (which unfortunately is making it into Facebook too), going through a lovely feed of writers and bloggers who keep the spirit of the IndieWeb going is like getting a glass of ice water in (LinkedIn) hell. Nowadays I browse around the Kagi Small Web too with joy.

If I ever needed a reason to start writing again, being able to surround myself (virtually) with IndieWeb writers is it.

It’s great to be back on RSS.