So I’ve been in the market for a newer/working RSS reader for a while, and about two weeks ago I decided to try out Substack’s new reader. Here are my thoughts.
First, infinite scroll in your inbox. I hate this and would dearly love to be able to turn it off, but can deal for now.
Feed discovery: For now, you have to have the exact address of the feed. You don’t appear to be able to type in a URL and have the feed discovered. On the other hand, it seems to be pretty forgiving when it comes to parsing and rendering feeds.
Downside: You can’t delete a feed after you’ve added it. I get that this is still in beta, but that seems like something that should be part of any release.
Finally, you can’t yet import or export opml files, but maybe that’s coming in a future update.
Final verdict: I’ll continue to use this for now unless another reader comes along, hopefully one that doesn’t suck. My kingdom for a feed reader that doesn’t suck and that I can use across devices.