How I’m reading

I’ve used RSS for a years. I have over two hundred feeds in my RSS reader (though many are inactive). Not as far back as the Google Reader days, mind; I started off with The Old Reader. Back when I move my phone over to Lineage OS and removed all Google services I moved to Newsblur, largely because it had a client available on F-Droid when The Old Reader did not¹.

But I have been feeling dissatisfied with it. Part of trying to move away from social media towards following other people’s bogs² is that I’ve moved more towards RSS being the primary means that I follow and view people’s posts and I have found that Newsblur was just not the most pleasant reading experience.

I can not fully explain why I did not like reading in it. I think perhaps the interface is too intrusive and the reading panel feels too cramped. I had mostly used it to open links to other pages rather than reading text in place. It has some other problems too: It was consistently failing to update some feeds that had well formed RSS documents (it would always succeed on a local, manual refresh) and its handling of Mastodon posts was pretty abysmal. In particular if a post had an image with alt text it would display the alt text in place of the main body of the post.

But even putting those issues aside I want reading to be a pleasant experience. I am here to have fun and as much fun as it is to make and style my website—and I do hope that people look at it—I think an important part of a decentralised web is that the centralised way that you read it should be as smooth and fun as possible.

Which is a long preamble to say that I am currently using a free trial of Feedbin and I am enjoying it. It a more pleasant, less busy, interface and it seems to have special handling of Mastodon posts where it displays them with the avatar included and everything.

I may still try out some other readers but as it stands once my twenty-eight days are up I think I’d be happy to pay five United States dollars a month to keep using it.

It isn’t perfect. The “extract full content” option seems to be more hit-and-miss than Newsblur’s version of that feature, especially for some news sites I follow, and it lacks Newsblur’s ability to just display the full source page in an iframe, but I prefer it overall. I do also wish you could do little unique colour styling on different people’s blogs though, are there any readers that do that?

Also I figured I would also give a shoutout to Freetube which I use to watch Youtube videos now. Using Lib Redirect when I open a Youtube link it automatically opens in Freetube, which provides a nice, decluttered interface for Youtube, does not display ads and even has Sponsor Block built in. It does have its issues. The main one being that if I click a Youtube video it will replace whatever one was already open and I will lose my current position. As someone who tends to leave long videos running as I do other stuff with frequent pausing to let myself concentrate on other things³ I have had to learn to stop myself from absently clicking on other random Youtube links in the middle of something else.