Back in January 2023, my life as I had lived it through most if not all of the 2010’s had come to an end. The primary source of information for me, Twitter, had been cut off as a primary source of information to which I had access. Sure, the site still existed, but when you used an app like Tweetbot the way you use the service was fundamentally different than the way the service offered you by default. Without the ability to sync my timeline placement in chronological order, it was too much of a pain to keep up with the service (R.I.P. OpenCommish). Twitter was a huge source of random news for me, but not in the sense that I got what I wanted and what I didn’t. Somehow, over the decade and more of curating my following and regex filters, I ended up having access to all that I wanted to see as well as being informed about things I would have otherwise missed. This worked out since Twitter was just where everyone posted about everything. In the grand scheme of things, there was no Twitter clique — everyone from everywhere seemed to post about anything at anytime. I learned about bands, movies, anime, and all sorts of other news and current events that someone I followed would just so happen to RT/quote. My “fear of missing out” was essentially always sated, I felt “plugged in” and I felt like I was always aware of various going ons.
During the downfall leading up to the API shutdown I was trying to find alternative sources of news I could follow on Mastodon to use in Ivory, the Tweetbot successor. I figured using lists and curating my timeline there would give me some percentage of what I would miss when Twitter died off. Sadly, this never worked out as well as I had hoped. Too many people weren’t there, and I had no idea how to find and follow the people that could give me that “random” repost that would inform me of something my RSS feeds wouldn’t otherwise provide me. It didn’t help that the fediverse’s handling of art and illustrations was consistently a hassle to deal with.
As my interest in the fediverse waned, I tried even harder to curate my RSS feeds in an app called Reeder. I had been using this app for almost just as long as Tweetbot, as its a really good frontend for RSS reading and managment. That app was also where I was storing my “read later” articles and videos. Any videos, posts, links, you name it ended up in a tagged section of that read later pile. I had a good system going on, and thanks to the integration into Apple’s platforms I could share things from anywhere to it to check out later. This was how I got all my YouTube videos (and stopped using a YT account), tech news, anime news, and various gaming and music updates.
Reeder did the job for me most of the time and I even had some funky setups to export YouTube videos for temporary playlists to catch up on music and the like. Even so, without Twitter I felt I was missing so much that was going on both in the world and in the circles I liked to follow. I felt continually isolated from the current events of the world, aside from breaking news that I got from my local news app or Apple News. Eventually, one of the several times Bluesky took off with the masses, I learned that the creator of Reeder was creating a new app of the same name and that it would allow you to see RSS, Bluesky, and Mastodon posts all in one unified timeline.
Now this wasn’t a new concept. After the Twitter API died another Twitter app developer, Iconfactory, had launched a Kickstarter that promised this very same concept and I found it very intriguing then. My worries were just about “when” and “how much”, and so I forgot about it for a while. When I finally got into the Reeder Testflight (aka beta testing) I trialed importing my RSS feeds as they existed in the classic version of Reeder. At first, I didn’t buy it as a great upgrade. It felt clunky, and it didn’t work like how I was used to. I felt it would be too easy to miss new posts if the sync wasn’t reliable enough. I didn’t like how limiting it was to save things for later, or the lack of ability to organise things into folders. Over several weeks I kept an intermittent eye on both Reeder apps to see if the new app would really work out for me and if it really was missing any updates.
Around September 2024 is when I finally had the new Reeder app click for me. I still had known issues with YouTube syncing not working reliably (at time of writing, still weird with lives/premieres) but most things showed up properly. I decided to drop using Reeder Classic and FreshRSS, and commit fully to this new unified timeline approach. I actually didn’t need folders to organise feeds, and I found a new way to handle my “read later” backlog. One single timeline for all my YouTube videos, blog posts, news feeds (even the spam-y ones), Bluesky following (which respects the mute filter on Bluesky), and Mastodon following. In fact, it made it even easier to handle social posts and helped me segment who to follow on each platform, and follow people who were only on Mastodon without needing to categorise people into lists. This was slowly leading up to the next Bluesky migration boom, where the new Reeder app would show me how much I really did enjoy the unified timeline concept. I could be up to date with people and not miss new posts as easily.
I won’t go update-by-update or some such, but needless to say with my time using the new Reeder and with the various updates and improvements to the app and experience (which has been consistently getting better) I’ve been completely sold on this concept. It satisfies that itch that I gained using an app like Tweetbot, scrolling up through a consistently synced chronological timeline. It’s as if every post in the timeline is a Tweet on a read-only app where you can easily swipe to open and view in another app/browser or swipe to check later or tag for future review. It just makes sense once you add all of your sources and get into the rhythm, if you were already used to this kind of approach for social media. Now all of these sources were in one single app. There’s no red bubble on the app, no unread counts, no feeling of needing to catch up. Just a continuous stream of information to catch up on during a quick break or after a long day. The fact the app has many updates ahead fills me with a nerdy sense of joy. I can only hope others will try this out as more apps (Tapestry, Surf) enter the fray and give us a more unified approach to this post-Twitter internet where different people use different sites and platforms to share their updates and news. It won’t matter if people want to use a different service, so long as the service allows an app to query new updates for you.
Below is a few screenshots of the current Reeder app, showcasing the home timeline and “read later” items. This all works identically across devices (phone, tablet, desktop) and while the sync across devices can end up being a little weird at times, it is rather reliable nowadays.
