Who Is Influencing You? Why I Made an RSS Reader in 2026

I get my news from an RSS reader, and I’m aware that in 2026 that sounds a little like telling people you still have a landline. Meanwhile, about one in five American adults now regularly get news on TikTok. That number shoots up to 39% for Gen Z, according to the Pew Research Center.

But feed readers have been how I get the news for a long time, all while everyone around me was getting theirs from Facebook, then Twitter, then whatever came next. While the idea might seem dated, this fall I launched a feed reader of my own, called Zetfeed, because I wanted my news to reach me without anyone influencing it along the way.

The people and bots getting between you and the story

When you get your news from a social feed, two things happen before you’ve read a word of it. First, an algorithm decides what you see. Its job is to keep you scrolling, so the news you get is the news that performs, which isn’t always the news that matters. It also shows up sandwiched between your cousin’s vacation photos and three ads for the same mattress you bought last week.

Second, and more and more often, someone steps in to tell you what to make of it. In 2024 Pew found that 21% of American adults regularly get news from influencers, and that 77% of those influencers have no affiliation or background with a news organization. A few of them are genuinely excellent, but even the good ones hand you the story already skewed, with their take attached. Nothing against anyone explaining the economy in front of a ring light, but I’d rather hear about it from the people who reported it first, and then make up my own mind.

A feed reader takes both of them out of the equation. You pick the sources and you see what they publish, with nobody ranking it to keep you around or narrating it for you.

What a feed reader actually is

Almost every news site, blog and podcast publishes a feed. It’s just a list of everything the site has posted, written so software can read it. YouTube channels, blogs, Bluesky accounts and plenty of newsletters publish one too. A feed reader collects the feeds you choose and shows you what’s new, in the order they were published. The idea dates to 1999, and if you listen to podcasts, you’ve probably been using feeds for years without knowing it.

It never took over the world, mostly because the big platforms offered something easier and free, as long as you didn’t count what it cost you in attention. When Google sent Google Reader to the Google Graveyard in 2013, plenty of people assumed the whole idea went with it. But publishers kept putting out feeds the entire time.

Why build another one

There are good feed readers out there, made by people who care about them, and the one I used did the job right up until it didn’t. YouTube videos stopped playing properly, feeds didn’t update when I wanted them to, and the features I kept hoping for never arrived.

I’ve spent many years building things for the web, and I care a lot about things being done well. So I decided to build one I actually wanted to use with a lot of features so it could be my every day feed. If you want something done right, you do it yourself, so I'm told.

What I wanted it to do

Building your own forces you to figure out what you actually believe, and a few of those beliefs ended up shaping Zetfeed.

There are no ads, no tracking and no AI summaries. In fact, the apps don’t carry any third-party analytics code, because I don't like being stalked by my apps. And if you followed a writer, it’s because you wanted to read what that person wrote, not a paraphrase, which would just be one more thing standing between you and the story.

I also believe your feed should have only what you chose. And there are many options for how to view your feed, from a magazine view to card layout, because one size does not fit all.

I also wanted everything in one place: news sites, blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, Bluesky accounts and newsletters. Paste in a link from anywhere and Zetfeed finds the feed, even on sites that don’t advertise one. YouTube videos and podcasts play right in the app.

Then there’s the nice-to-haves: local news, events and weather for where you live, track your teams, tv shows, stocks, and even the lotto with the unique "insert cards" system. To top it all off, we've included five original daily games, just for fun. It all works on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Android and the web, and it stays in sync, so the article you saved on your phone over coffee is waiting on your laptop at lunch.

And why a blog

Building a news reader means thinking a lot about how the news reaches people, and at some point all that thinking needed somewhere to go. That’s what this blog, Postfeed, is for. It’s a blog about the news itself, and if you’d like to see what that looks like, start with what’s happening at Reddit, which turns off its RSS feeds on November 13, 2026.