Phantom Obligation

A good read from Terry Godier on the design of most RSS readers and the urgency it can create to always keep up. I've had conversations on Mastodon about this and have at times purged my reading list when I get too far behind. They've coined a neat term for the feeling these readers, phantom obligation.

The design of most readers are based on email clients and the post does a great job of exemplifying that through interactive components.

I discovered this post from Derek Kedziora's comments on the same topic.

In somewhat related news, I came across feedspool-go v0.2.0, from Andreas' weekly link dump, that creates a different user experience for an RSS reader.

The key thing is this: I don't want an inbox of unread items. I want to scroll through a personal newspaper of recent content from the web - I stop reading when I see stuff I saw before. This basically does that.

This follows what Dave Winer calls the "River of News" pattern, which is fundamentally different from inbox-style RSS readers.

I'm pretty happy with miniflux so far and have created reading habits around it but wouldn't mind giving this a go for a while.