Will be interesting to see if this becomes the Google Reader replacement missing all these years. Substack is uniquely positioned to offer this kind of product.
I was worried that the silent RSS defaults with Wordpress would be murdered by stuff like Substack, and was very relieved to have the blah.substack.com/feed option. This is cool! Hope it gets enough traction for them to be happy about it
An article about RSS? Someone's gotta mention Feedly so it may as well be me :)
I've been using Feedly for a while (since Google Reader went away) and it works well. I'm on the 'free' tier and am happy with it. Note: I'm not associated with Feedly directly (not an employee, not paid by them, etc)
Substack publications already have rss support, any 3rd party rss reader can be used to consume the news letters.
Inoreader has newsletter subs built into it as well.
I already do this with Feedbin and Reeder on macOS.
This is similair to one of my favorite features of RSS reader https://newsblur.com/. Your (free) account gives you an email address that can be used to register for newsletters. Then, when they come in, its presented exactly like the RSS feed. And if a particular newsletter gets a little too noisy, you can remove it forever without hunting down the unsubscribe button.
I gave it a shot, it's off to a good start. It's VERY basic so far. No OPML support, no categories either. But it looks nice and I think the idea is a good one. It's lacking a bunch of standard RSS reader features, but I assume they're aware and probably going to add more.
Why do you think Substack is investing into RSS?
Seems like a weird move for a company focused on newsletters.
miniflux is a really great self-hosted solution. It's clean and minimalist with some really nice downloading/scraping options.
That combined with kill-the-newsletter (for turning email into RSS feeds) has been working really well for me for the past year or so.
Does this work with just Substack content? Or does it work with any RSS feed? I like Substack but am wary of giving control to yet another centralized tool that may ultimately try to leverage a walled garden as their platform strategy.
Earlier this year I found https://kill-the-newsletter.com (no affiliation) and have moved over ALL of my newsletter subscriptions to it. I now get like no email and it's so awesome!
I now read everything with https://bazqux.com (the most true-to-Google Reader I found and the only SaaS I pay for, no affiliation) and it's really enjoyable. The RSS reader format is definitely one of the best reading formats in my opinion.