My feed reading preferences and habits
I subscribe to a ton of feeds. 126, at last count. This is in constant flux and blogs/websites are added and deleted regularly based on their activity levels. From what I have seen, most feeds have 5, 10 or 20 latest posts. I don't think I have ever read all the 20+ new articles from one blog in my feed reader. A total of 5 latest articles is somewhat manageable. 20 means some will be read, rest will be skipped. A 100 though? Chances are I have hit Read All and moved on already.
When an existing feed in my list shows up with 100+ new posts, its usually because they are rebuilding their website (Bradley Taunt's blog). It can be quite annoying when its done multiple times. I am guilty of the same when my blog feed was refreshed a few times just trying to figure out Jekyll. I am sure there are ways to keep the feed from refreshing when switching the blogging engine but I have never bothered to find out (I am sorry!). Even then, a 100 posts in a fresh feed is just... overwhelming. My blog feed keeps the post count at 5 for such reasons. Easy on new readers and easy on existing ones, if I move away from Publii or move the blog.
Bradley mentions his new blog system and how his feed is going to be edited manually with no summaries or full content. My feed reader is a dedicated reading app with no distractions and I appreciate full content whenever it's provided. Checking out the full website every time defeats the purpose. Clever workarounds exists in feed readers for this problem. Miniflux and FreshRSS both have ways to fetch full content or create new rules to do so. It doesn't work for every article out there but it works well most of the time.
So I got 10 blogs with 5 latest posts with full content. Do I read all 50 of them? Its the same case with a fresh blog with 20 or more posts. Some will be read or glanced through immediately, most will be skipped and very few will be fav-ed. The favorites are my read it later posts which I go through at the end of the day. Really long articles or posts which deserve more than just a glance.
A self-hosted Miniflux instance, NewsFlash on elementary and Reeder on iOS are the current tools I use to consume feeds. Reeder is just perfection. NewsFlash is nice to read the articles in but could do with a fix for the random crashes. Miniflux is built just right but has its own nonsense of not refreshing some feeds on certain occasions. Manually refreshing all the feeds from the web interface once in a while to kickstart couple of stuck feed is all the trouble Miniflux gives.
A feed reader provides a much nicer experience in consuming the content on the internet. One which is devoid of algorithmic manipulation, popular posts, boosts, likes, ads or trackers. One where the reader is in control. How do you consume the internet?