[hifromwork]

My problem with RSS is that I am a completionist. I add too many different blogs and aggregators and then can't keep up. Then reading this becomes basically work. And then I lose interest.

But I still want to return to RSS. Is there a good - ideally minimalistic - RSS client that anyone here recommends?

[WorldMaker]

Joke: RSS Completionism is easy when there are so many fewer websites with good RSS feeds these days.

More seriously, a big shift in some of the modern RSS clients is feeding that completionism in tunable ways. I know Newsblur the best because that's what I've used for a number of years now, and it's got a number of tools like the ability to demote/mute certain tags or authors from given feeds or promote other tags or others to a "Focused" feed. It has a concept of "infrequently updated feeds" to bubble up those quiet but powerful feeds you might follow that you want to read first before diving into the river of whatever firehose feeds you also like to subscribe.

Some of the other modern RSS readers have their own similar tools.

The nice thing about RSS is that completion is still possible. All of the newer social media want to give you an illusion of infinite feeds that go on forever to keep you locked inside and "engaged". But RSS doesn't work on "engagement" and there's a natural end of new content each day.

[eviks]

You'd want the opposite - maximalistic client that let's you filter out what you can't keep up with (e.g., separate stories from one other you don't like from the stories from the author you love, short stories from long ones, stories on topics you don't care about from the ones on topics you're very interested in, etc.), hiding that out of the UI to a dark corner (so that you satisfy that completionist feeling you're not missing anything, but will practically never visit it), but also trying to simplify the experience of creating those filters manually and with suggestions based on what you read.

Though I don't know of any services/cross-platform clients (for syncing state) that do that well

[domysee]

I built a different kind of RSS reader that might help with that. It's called Lighthouse, and the tagline is "Inbox zero for RSS feeds".

The idea is that instead of showing feeds separately, there's an inbox where all new content lands. Then you look over that, and add only the articles you find interesting to your library. The other articles you can mark as read, and then they are removed from the inbox (directly to the archive).

This way you still keep up with all rss feeds, and it's much easier to filter which content you read.

Please let me know what you think. I'm always looking for advice on how to make the product better.

The website is lighthouseapp.io

[mikae1]

Sounds like you're methodology is lacking, not your client. Be selective.