Everyone blames RSS for dying. For a while I was convinced the problem was technical: brittle feeds, missing endpoints, formats nobody agrees on.
It wasn't. The hard part was never the plumbing. It was knowing which sources are actually worth following.
An empty feed reader is useless. Setting one up properly means hunting down RSS and Atom URLs one at a time, guessing which blogs still post, and finding out weeks later that half of them went quiet in 2021. That afternoon of link-hunting is the real reason people give up and go back to an algorithmic timeline that decides for them.
So I did the boring part. 271 vetted feeds, grouped into 24 themes, as a ready-made pack you point a reader at instead of assembling by hand.
A few of the themes and how many sources each carries:
- Frontier AI Labs (12), AI Tools & ML Platforms (12), AI Research & Academia (12)
- Languages & Frameworks (13), Developer Tools (12), Cloud & Infrastructure (13), Security (12)
- Databases & Data (12), Hardware & Chips (11)
And it is not all work. There are themes for Space, Science, Gaming, Anime, Movies & TV, Music, Books, and Food, because a reader you actually enjoy opening is a reader you keep using.
Every entry is a real, stable source, organized so a theme reads as a coherent feed instead of noise. You choose the themes; the vetting is already done. That is the middle path between an algorithm choosing for you and a blank reader making you do everything.
The full theme list, the key for each one, and every source in the pack is here: https://mederic.me/blog/neurowire-taps-pack
Honest question for anyone still running a feed reader: how do you actually find new sources worth adding? Or did the blank-page problem win, and you quietly stopped?
Top comments (0)