You ain't gonna read that
Do not lie to yourself. Those 2000+ articles in your RSS reader are never going to be picked up.
I deployed FreshRSS some time ago, installed Capy Reader on my phone (What a great app!) and went on to search for interesting blogs to subscribe to.
I started with a Wallabag instance.
Since October 24, 2024 you read 1205 articles. That is about 2.48 a day!
I don't have raw data on it, but my intuition and experience tells me the articles weren't selected randomly. I'm confident 40% of them comes from the top ten domains/sources/authors, because they tend to write articles I like to read.
When I'm done with an article I enjoyed, I open the author website and look through. Sometimes I read a few more articles there, sometimes I skim the bio, and if I like what I'm seeing, I'll add their feed. Next time I'll know they posted something, and I won't have to rely on Lobste.rs or the word of mouth.
This comes with a problem, though. I have about sixty feeds configured now, and they produce an endless stream of content.
This morning I opened Capy to see 1700 unread articles. Overwhelming. Exhausting. Just imagining the time to evaluate which article would be interesting and which wouldn't filled me with dread.
So, I made the big mental step, and marked a lot of them as Read. The unread articles number went down bit by bit, and now sits at 940.
I would have loved to read every single word of them, but I'd have loved to do that with my big library of books I bought, with the movies and shows my friends recommended me, but it is simply not possible.
Every day, in this digital world, we are in the midst of battle for attention. I assert RSS is much better than Instagram Reels feed, but the similarities are present.
I decided to be much more cautious of how I spend my time. I have limited my Instagram app time to five minutes a day, just to look at what my more distant friends are doing. I am more picky when I open YouTube. And I am more picky when I skim through RSS backlog as well.
If an article does not feel useful to me, I mark it as Read immediately and forget about it. It is not offenstive to the author, I just wasn't the right audience.
I plan to go through more of the feeds and mark their backlogs as Read, but this morning I went from 1700 to 940 and that already feels like progress.
I am an Inbox Zero person, and you aren't convincing me to ignore the number. Current caught my attention, but I am on Android.
Perhaps Capy could grow a toggle to not display the number?
Edit: After publishing this article, I went to check the settings. Cappy supports this, under Display & Appearance > Unread Badges. It is very new, which makes me feel better for missing it.