Substack Reader: An RSS feed reader for tracking newsletter subscriptions | Hacker News Reader

Substack Reader: An RSS feed reader for tracking newsletter subscriptions

blog.substack.com

78 pointswh-uws24 comments

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.

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.

Have you tried Inoreader? That hits the sweet spot for me - great balance between features (both premium and free) and usability.

big +1 for inoreader, esp when searching for new feeds.

another +1 for inoreader; its (premium) twitter RSS feeds enabled me to essentially go cold turkey on social media in general as far as the daily checking went.

What does their feed offer that is not covered by nitter.net?

What is Feedly missing for you?

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)

Thank you, Mike. For anyone who wants to get Newsletter feeds into Feedly: https://blog.feedly.com/get-newsletters-in-feedly/ (we have also Twitter feeds)

Substack publications already have rss support, any 3rd party rss reader can be used to consume the news letters.

This doesn't really work for paid newsletters. The two exceptions I've found are for RSS readers that operate as browser extensions and for substack podcasts, which come with a dedicated RSS address for each subscriber. I like to read newsletters on my Kindle via Calibre and it would really make things much simpler if substack just did what they did for podcasts for all newsletters without exception.

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.

That's what I use as well, and that was my baseline for comparing this new one. It's missing most everything so far compared to newsblur.I've been using newsblur since Google killed Reader and I've been happy with it.

Feedbin (https://feedbin.com) also has this feature.

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.

They’re adding features for their customers. I mean I have exactly one Substack subscription, but the fact that I pay $100/year for it makes me rather firmly invested in getting some value out of it, so I actually do read the emails that come in, but some parts of the publication I prefer to read in NetNewsWire instead like the fact checking portions.

I could see why they would want Substack readers subscribed to multiple publications to have one place outside their inbox to get more value. Some people don’t actually like the email newsletter format and words are words wherever they are.

Newsletters are always at risk of being flagged as spam, or not delivered (eg the recent Gmail outage). Meaning their email delivery has to be perfect or their subscribers miss out.

An RSS reader makes perfect sense for them, actually.

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.

It's pre-populated with your Substack newsletters, but it works with any RSS feed.

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