# I'm making an RSS reader

Source: https://john.onolan.org/making-an-rss-reader
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Im-making-an-RSS-reader?index=0x696e1527ad63e9b29a62fa4e6cc12248955057a16a6d102c254efb5fd14b8ecec94a1cb4
Submitted by misha on 2026-01-19 UTC, 6 upvotes, 1 comment

## Summary

The author is building an RSS reader called Alcove, a project they describe as a terrible idea done mostly for fun. They say existing readers do not work the way they want, their current RSS app has not been updated in about 10 years and has a poor reading experience, and Twitter links and YouTube subscriptions are hard to keep up with. Their goal is a quiet single place to catch up on things they care about, without noise and engagement farming. Progress updates are shared on Twitter and on social web platforms such as Ghost, Mastodon, Flipboard and Threads.

## Article

Why am I making an RSS reader? I don't know. There are a thousand RSS readers out there already, and they all read RSS feeds, but none of them work the way I'd like them to. So I'm making my own.

It's obviously a terrible idea. So why do it?

Mostly for fun.

There are all sorts of interesting things being published on the web every day, but they're kind of all over the place.

I enjoy sitting down on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee and an hour to myself, but I don't enjoy opening my email inbox to read a newsletter, only to get sidetracked by 5 new emails that I should probably respond to. I don't enjoy wrestling my RSS app, which hasn't been updated in about 10 years and has a horrible reading experience. Reading links from Twitter gets me lost down an algorithm hole. YouTube doesn't even show me new videos from people I'm subscribed to.

I wish it were just all in one place. Without all the noise and engagement farming. Just a quiet little spot where I could catch up with things I care about.

That's what I'm making.

I'm calling it Alcove.

If you want to follow along with this questionable side project of undefined scope, I'm sharing live updates of progress on Twitter, here - or on Social Web platforms (Ghost, Mastodon, Flipboard, Threads etc) on @alcove@blog.alcove.news - or on Bluesky here.

There's a more than half-decent chance of a disastrous outcome.

## Comments

**tim**: > I enjoy sitting down on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee and an hour to myself

I also love this, but let's be real. Most of the time this evolves into furiously doomscrolling a corposlop social media platform and getting involved in some culture war issue. But yea, the romantic idea of starting smth new with a fresh coffee on a rainy Sunday morning is quite nice to imagine.