A few weeks ago, I shared an essay from Terry Godier where he created the term phantom obligation to describe the design of today's RSS readers. This is where by design rss readers, and other apps, create to do list of tasks that need to be completed, notifications that should be checked. An urgency.
Today, I discovered, through lobste.rs, his release of Current an iPhone/iPad/Mac app created to provide "a river" of RSS entries. Sources, RSS feeds, are categorised by type which defines how long they linger in the river. There's indicators to silence noisy feeds or ones that always remain unread. The feed arranges itself overtime based on usage. Although there seems to be settings to override certain behaviours based on user preference.
I do find the following paragraph to be contradictory.
These aren't algorithmic recommendations. They're not trying to maximize engagement or steal your attention. They're a librarian noticing your habits and quietly rearranging the shelves.
Regardless there's a lot more features than the ones mentioned. It's clear a lot of thought has gone into the design. If and when it becomes available on Android or as a web app I'd be eager to give it a go.
To an extent it does mirror my manual usage of Miniflux, or in the authors words I'm ”granting the article a status change, like an administrator processing paperwork. Read. Filed. Handled.” Need articles that go unread for a while get marked as read and removed. Personal essays and blogs tend to stay longer unless they're topics I'm not interested in. I like the intentional act of filtering.
Read from link