In my end-of-year roundup of the software I use, I mentioned that Lire was my RSS feed reader of choice, because despite a few defects, it allowed me to view posts in their natural environment, that is, by opening a web view on the author’s website: I prefer this way, to enjoy the blog’s personality, instead of seeing all posts reduced to the same flat-and-simple formatting.

Unfortunately, soon after that, Lire started behaving even more poorly, leading me to go back to NetNewsWire: fast and reliable, but devoted to its plain visualisation and still affected by the issue of refusing to add feeds more often than not, claiming that ’no feed could be found’ (and forcing me to either add it on NetNewsWire on my phone, open Feedly and its AI-ridden web interface, or keep a second RSS reader installed just for that).

I made peace with that for a while, but then Simone mentioned the same homogeneity problem and started looking for alternatives. That post reawakened in me the desire not to settle down - although not enough to push me to spend a lot of time, again, to find the Holy Grail of readers.
I must also add that I am perfectly fine with the classic three-pane structure, and I don’t feel the same Phantom Obligation pressure to get to ‘RSS-inbox zero’: I’ve subscribed to so many high-volume feeds since the years I wrote for Cinema News websites, that I’ve become insensitive to the ‘Unread Posts’ badge.

Simone found a couple of solutions he likes, and his post convinced me to try Current, which I had previously dismissed because its website signalled a fundamental mismatch between my sensibility and its creator.
I bought the app, then I immediately channelled Gob Bluth (‘I’ve made a huge tiny mistake’) when I realised it doesn’t support Feedly as a source (my fault for not checking beforehand, of course).
I tried it nevertheless with a local OPML, but I confirm it’s not for me: maybe I didn’t take enough time to appreciate the ‘river/sift’ paradigm, maybe it’s the fact that there’s no default setting that lets me view the posts in their original website, maybe it’s my middle-aged-person resistance to change.

One thing I liked in Current is the ‘Voices’ feature, that purposes to put an emphasis on people rather than feeds. Again, the way it’s designed doesn’t work for me, but the idea that each of these blogs is a manifestation of a real person living somewhere in the world resonated with me.

A couple of weeks have passed since, during which I have decided I should leave Feedly (I’ve been using the free tier since Google Reader’s demise), and I looked for an alternative that would allow me to synchronise my reading status between different devices (most readers have the option to keep in sync via iCloud, but that doesn’t work across different apps). I toyed with the idea of self-hosting FreshRSS, but doing it securely would double my hosting bill. So this is another thing to solve, at some point. And to force myself to do it, I deleted my Feedly account anyway.

Going back to the idea of ‘following people rather than feeds’, yesterday I found a post by Ton Zijlstra explaining how he organises his feeds by ‘social distance’: different folders reflecting his closeness to the person behind each feed. This also doesn’t really apply to me because currently I interact with very few of the people I follow, but I like the collateral, very simple idea, of renaming the feed by including the person’s name.
So I spent some time yesterday reorganising my feed list by enforcing the separation between personal blogs and multi-author or professional websites, and prefacing ‘anonymous’ blog titles with the blogger’s name (based exclusively on the blog’s ‘about’ page or byline).
And I have removed all those cinema news outlets that I wasn’t reading anyway.

I haven’t solved my main problem - au contraire, I have created a new one by no longer having a unique server for synchronisation and tying myself to NetNewsWire -, but my feeds feel much friendlier now.