It's like podcasts, but for reading!

When Google killed Google Reader, I didn’t look for a replacement feed reader. Most of the blogs I followed since the early 2000s had died and their authors had switched to social media platforms. Posting to social media is a lot easier for most people than blogging, I suppose. And there’s that wonderful dopamine hit of incoming likes, comments, and subscriptions.

I haven’t missed my Facebook or Twitter accounts since I deleted them. I had brief dalliances with Bluesky and Mastodon, and while they reminded me of the early, friendly days of Twitter, I didn’t like them as much as I liked blogs, so I deleted these accounts, too. It turns out, I like the effort associated with sitting at my desk and typing a blog post. There are no analytics or notifications associated with my posts and yet it’s still satisfying. And I can always find that blog post I once wrote, in a way I could rarely find an old social media post.

What is also satisfying is reading the blogs of others with overlapping interests. Articles longer than 280 characters are engaging in a way that social media posts are not. The page they are displayed on does not try to draw you in to “engage”. There are no games or other distractions trying to keep you on the platform or advertising masquerading as content. And it’s easy to find or share posts without needing to log in to a platform.

For example:

You can run NetNewsWire 7 on some devices and NetNewsWire 6 on your Sequoia Mac, and it all just works.

Source: John Gruber, NetNewsWire 7 for Mac

Which is how I discovered the wonderful NetNewsWire app, on which I have been happily reading blogs for months and recommend to you, today. The title for this blog post came from the NetNewsWire site.