Moving my RSS reading from Inoreader to NetNewsWire

I’ve mentioned Inoreader several times on this blog, as it has been the service that I used to consume and process the RSS feeds of the various blogs and sites I follow for several years now. It has a lot of great features, particularly for power users. The catch, of course, is that you need to pay for most of those, which is fair enough.

However, as I’ve changed my RSS feed-reading habits over the last year and a half, I’ve noticed that I’m paying for a lot more than I use. Downgrading would be one option, once my current Pro subscription lapses. But now I have another option, as NetNewsWire supports synching of RSS feeds via iCloud.

I’ve had NetNewsWire on my radar for a while now, but had held off using it until recently because it was initially only available for Macs and with limited synching options. (This is not a knock against Brett Simmons, I understand that he needed to prioritise getting other features working fully first and ironing out bugs.)

I could have gone the route of exporting my OPML data from Inoreader and importing that into NetNewsWire, but instead I connected NetNewsWire to my Inoreader account, then decided which of my feeds to copy over. While that’s several more steps, it did give me the opportunity to further whittle down the number of feeds I was following.

Is there anything I’ll miss from Inoreader? Its ability to subscribe directly to YouTube channels, and let me watch videos without having to visit YouTube would probably be top of my list, followed by the filtering capability. However, it occurred to me that my most-filtered feeds were a sign that they weren’t that valuable to me, and YouTube videos are a major time-sink for me even without the additional distraction of YouTube itself.

Please note that this is my subjective analysis of my usage of Inoreader. I would definitely encourage you to check it out if you’re a heavy user of social media but want a way to see the content you’re interested in without added noise or distraction — it can read Twitter accounts and Facebook pages for you, alongside the aforementioned YouTube channels, and even gives you a means to subscribe to and read email newsletters without giving out your personal details. It may no longer be a good fit for me, but that’s because my habits have changed over the years and I’ve stepped away from the firehose.