Current RSS Reader: Reimagining News Feeds as Rivers Not Inboxes [2025]

The Death of Guilt-Driven News Consumption

You know that feeling. You open your RSS reader after a few days away, and there it is: that red badge with a number that fills you with dread. One hundred and seventy-three unread items. You feel guilty immediately. That's not a coincidence. It's by design.

Most RSS readers since the early days have borrowed their interface language directly from email clients. Unread counts. Bold text for new items. That visual hierarchy that screams "you're behind." But here's the thing: email's unread count actually means something important. Someone wrote to you. They might be waiting for your response. That number represents social obligation.

RSS feeds aren't like that. Nobody's waiting for your response to a news article. But we kept importing the emotional framework anyway. We brought the anxiety without the actual cause. And for millions of people who tried RSS, that psychological burden became a reason to quit.

That's exactly the problem a new app called Current set out to solve. Instead of treating your feeds like an inbox, Current treats them like something fundamentally different: a river. And that simple conceptual shift changes everything about how you interact with news and information.

The developer behind Current, Terry Godier, spent his free time wrestling with this exact problem. He built Current as a side project, but it represents years of thinking about what RSS could be if we stopped forcing it into email metaphors. The result is an app that costs just $9.99 as a one-time purchase and includes no subscriptions or in-app purchases. It's available on iOS, iPad, and Mac, with a web version coming later.

But before diving into what makes Current different, it's worth understanding what we're actually talking about when we say "RSS" and why a new approach matters in 2025.

What RSS Actually Is (And Why People Stopped Using It)

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. In practical terms, it's a standardized format that lets websites publish their content in a structured way that other applications can read and display. When you subscribe to a website's RSS feed, you're not visiting their site. Instead, the feed itself delivers the headlines, excerpts, or full articles directly to your reading app.

Think of it like this: instead of checking ten different news websites every morning, you subscribe to their feeds and everything arrives in one place. It was revolutionary in the early 2000s, especially for people who consumed information professionally. Journalists, researchers, developers, and information junkies loved RSS because it was a way to stay on top of everything without the algorithm deciding what you should see.

RSS was hugely popular until Twitter arrived in 2006. Twitter essentially solved the same problem but with a social element. Instead of feeds from websites, you were now following people. The timeline became more engaging, and the social feedback (likes, retweets) made it feel more dynamic. By 2013, Google killed off Google Reader, one of the most popular RSS apps ever built. The death of Google Reader was treated as a major cultural moment. There were memorial posts. Journalists wrote obituaries.

But here's what actually happened: RSS didn't die. It went underground. Podcasts, for instance, are distributed entirely via RSS. You probably listen to podcasts and never think about RSS, but it's there in the background. People with real information consumption needs kept using RSS readers. There are still active communities of people using apps like Feedly, NetNewsWire, Inoreader, and Reeder. They never stopped.

What changed was the casual user base. If you weren't consuming information for work, or if you didn't identify as an information junkie, RSS felt like too much work. The guilt kicked in. The unread count climbed. You'd abandon it.

Current's entire premise is that RSS doesn't have to feel like work. It's not that RSS readers need better features. It's that they need a fundamentally different psychological framework.

The River Metaphor: How Current Changes the Game

When you open Current, what you see isn't a list. It's not organized by source or by date. It's a river. Content flows in, stays visible for a certain amount of time, and then gradually fades away. The key word is "gradually." This isn't like Twitter where you scroll past something once and it's gone forever. This is a river, and rivers linger.

Each piece of content has a lifespan that depends on what type of content it is. Breaking news stays bright and visible for three hours. Daily news articles hover around for about eighteen hours. Essays linger for three days. Evergreen content like tutorials stays visible for a week. This isn't arbitrary. It's based on how quickly different types of information become outdated or less relevant.

The genius of this approach is what it removes. It removes the obligation to mark things as read. It removes the pressure to get your feed to zero. You're not trying to "catch up." You're not trying to "process" your feeds. You're just reading what interests you in the moment, and when you're done, you move on.

The mechanics are thoughtful. You can swipe left to push content off the river immediately if you're not interested. Or you can just let it age naturally. At the end of each article, there's a "release" button that sends it back to the river. There's even an undo button if you accidentally dismiss something you wanted to read. The whole thing is designed to feel effortless rather than obligatory.

When you first set up Current, you assign each of your feeds to one of five categories: Breaking, News, Article, Essay, or Tutorial. This isn't a strict classification system. It's a signal to the app about how fast content from that source typically becomes irrelevant. A tech news site might be "Breaking." A long-form publication might be "Essay." The app uses these categories to automatically adjust how long content stays visible.

So the metaphor isn't just aesthetic. It's functional. It actually changes how the app behaves.

The Anxiety-Reduction Design Philosophy

Everything in Current has been designed with one goal in mind: reduce the psychological friction of news consumption. That's not a minor feature. That's the entire product.

Consider the full-text fetching capability. Most websites truncate their RSS feeds. They include a headline and maybe the first paragraph, then force you to click through to their website so they can serve you ads. Current automatically fetches the full article text from the web, even if the website is trying to prevent that. You can read the full piece right in Current without ever leaving the app. There's no friction. No ad load times. No pop-ups.

Then there's the intelligence layer. If a particular source starts flooding your feed with too much content, Current notices. It prompts you to quiet them or rate-limit them. If you regularly skip content from a source, Current suggests you might want to unsubscribe. Conversely, if you're enthusiastically reading everything from a particular source, Current suggests you might want to pin them to the top so you see them first.

This is machine learning applied to the problem of sustainable information consumption. It's not trying to manipulate you into spending more time in the app. It's trying to help you maintain a healthy information diet.

Current also has a feature called "Voices," which acknowledges that sometimes you want to follow individual writers rather than entire publications. If a writer has their own RSS feed (and many do), you can subscribe directly to their work. The Voices feature lets you organize these individual writers separately from your general news feeds. This is something Current's developer Terry Godier has thought a lot about. He actually created a specification called Byline that adds author context to RSS feeds. It's a subtle way of saying: the news isn't just content. It's written by people with perspectives and styles you might specifically want to follow.

The Three-Category Organization System

Current organizes your reading life into three main categories, which the app cleverly calls "currents" (hence the name).

First, there's the main feed, simply called the "River." This is where most of your subscriptions flow. It's the default experience, the stream of everything you're subscribed to. As content ages and fades, new content arrives. It's constant, dynamic, and never stressful because there's no obligation to process it all.

Second, there's a "Voices" category. As mentioned, this is where individual writers and authors live. If you love a particular journalist or tech writer or academic, and they have an RSS feed, you can follow them here. The interface is optimized for following people rather than publications. It's a subtle way of shifting focus from institutions to the humans behind the content.

Third, there's "Read Later." This is your bookmarking system. When you encounter something in the river that you want to come back to, you can save it to Read Later. Unlike other read-later services, this isn't a separate app or a complex system. It's just there, integrated into the Current experience.

You can also create your own custom currents. Want to create a "Tech" current with just your tech subscriptions? You can do that. Want a "Design" current? Build it. You can manually create currents, or you can let Current analyze your reading patterns and suggest currents for you. Over time, the app learns what topics you actually engage with and helps you organize accordingly.

This organizational flexibility matters because it means Current can work for different types of information consumers. If you're a casual reader who just wants to see what's interesting, you can stick with the main River. If you're an information professional who needs to organize content by topic, you can build that structure. The app doesn't impose a workflow. It enables you.

One-Time Purchase vs. The Subscription Model

Let's talk about pricing, because in 2025 it's increasingly unusual.

Current costs $9.99 as a one-time purchase. That's it. No subscription. No in-app purchases. No premium tiers that unlock basic features. You pay nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, and you own the app. It includes iCloud Sync so your subscriptions and read-later items follow you across your devices. It includes OPML import so you can bring in all your existing feeds from whatever app you were using before.

This pricing model is deliberate. It signals something about the developer's philosophy. They're not trying to build a platform that captures you for recurring revenue. They're not trying to optimize metrics like monthly active users or engagement time. They're building an app, they're selling it, and that's the transaction.

In the age of SaaS everything, where subscriptions are normalized and monthly charges are expected, a one-time purchase feels almost radical. It also means the incentives are aligned with the user. The app doesn't need to optimize for engagement metrics. It doesn't need to addict you. It just needs to be genuinely useful.

If you're used to paying

This pricing also matters because RSS readers have historically struggled with monetization. Google Reader was killed partly because Google couldn't figure out how to make money on it. Many independent RSS apps have tried the subscription route and failed to retain users. Current's approach sidesteps that entire problem. It's not trying to be a platform. It's just a tool.

The Design Language: Subtlety as a Feature

When you use Current, you'll notice something that might seem small but actually isn't: the design doesn't shout. There are no notifications. No badges. No red numbers telling you that you're behind. The app uses subtle touches like font choices, gestures, color, and animation to create an experience that feels fundamentally different from typical productivity apps.

Content fades rather than disappears. It gradually becomes less salient until it's gone. This mimics how our own attention works. Something that was interesting three days ago becomes less interesting today. We don't suddenly flip a switch and decide it's irrelevant. We gradually lose interest. Current's design acknowledges that natural progression.

The color choices matter too. Rather than the bright, high-contrast design that's common in news apps and social media, Current uses a more muted palette. This isn't decoration. It's a signal that you don't need to be in a constant state of heightened attention. You can sit with this content calmly.

The gesture language is similarly considered. A left swipe dismisses content. A tap at the end of an article releases it back to the river. These aren't random choices. They map to the river metaphor intuitively. You're moving things along, not processing a checklist.

Even the way the app handles themes and visual customization reflects this philosophy. You can adjust colors and layouts, but the default design is already optimized for calm. The customization options exist, but they're not aggressively marketed as necessary features that unlock the "real" experience.

How Current Compares to Traditional RSS Readers

If you've used RSS readers before, you might be wondering how Current actually differs functionally from something like Feedly or NetNewsWire.

Feedly, which launched in 2008 and is still actively maintained, is probably the most popular general-purpose RSS reader. It works across platforms, includes a powerful free tier, and offers team collaboration features. But Feedly is also built on a more traditional framework. You see your feeds in a list. You see unread counts. You can organize by folders. It's designed for comprehensive feed consumption, which is great if that's what you want, but adds friction if you're a casual user.

NetNewsWire is an excellent macOS and iOS reader that's free and open source. It's actually powered by Feedly's infrastructure in the background, but the interface is cleaner and the philosophy is more focused. Still, it's organized around the idea of reading feeds completely. You see what's unread. You work through your subscriptions.

Inoreader and Reeder are premium options with more advanced features for power users. They're excellent if you need search, tagging, full-text storage, or other advanced capabilities. But again, they're built on the framework of comprehensive feed management.

Current's differentiation is simpler and more profound than "more features." It's asking a different question. Instead of "how can I help you read all your feeds," Current asks "how can I help you discover the interesting things without the burden." That's a fundamentally different product.

Where Current wins decisively is in the casual user market. If you've ever tried RSS and felt the anxiety kick in, Current is designed specifically for you. If you're an information professional who needs comprehensive feed management, you might still prefer a more traditional reader.

The river metaphor works because it changes expectations. You're not trying to reach inbox zero. You're not trying to "catch up." You're just floating along and reading what's interesting. That's psychologically very different from the traditional reader experience.

The Technical Infrastructure: What's Actually Happening

Let's talk about what's actually happening under the hood. Current isn't just a pretty interface over RSS feeds. There's meaningful technical work happening.

The full-text fetching capability, for instance, requires parsing HTML and extracting content intelligently. Many websites set up their RSS feeds to be truncated specifically to drive traffic. Current has to detect when that's happening and then fetch the actual article from the web. That's not trivial. It requires maintaining a content extraction pipeline that works across different website designs.

The aging system is algorithmic. Each feed category (Breaking, News, Article, Essay, Tutorial) has different decay curves. The app is tracking when each piece of content was published, applying different aging speeds based on category, and recalculating visibility continuously. This isn't just a timer counting down. It's a dynamic system.

The intelligence features, like suggesting when to mute sources or when to unsubscribe, require analyzing your reading patterns in real-time. The app is watching what you skip, what you engage with, and building a model of your interests. Importantly, this all happens on-device. Your reading data doesn't leave your phone unless you explicitly sync to iCloud, and even then it's encrypted.

The iCloud Sync system needs to handle keeping your subscriptions, reading list, and custom currents consistent across devices without creating conflicts. This is a solved problem for Apple developers, but it still requires careful implementation.

The ability to import OPML (which stands for Outline Processor Markup Language, a standard format for exporting feed lists) means you're not locked in. You can export your subscriptions and take them to another reader if you want to. That's actually rare in app design. Most apps make switching away as painful as possible. Current makes it easy.

The Byline Specification: Context as Content

One of the more interesting technical decisions in Current is the integration of something called the Byline specification.

Byline is a standard that Terry Godier created to add author information to RSS feeds. Normally, an RSS feed might tell you the headline, the article text, maybe a thumbnail image. But it doesn't tell you who wrote it. If you're following a publication with dozens of writers, you're seeing content from all of them mixed together.

Byline changes that. It embeds author metadata into the feed itself. That means RSS readers like Current can show you not just "The New York Times published something about AI" but "Jennifer Peck at The New York Times wrote something about AI." That distinction matters because you might love Jennifer's writing and want to follow her specifically, but not care about every article the publication publishes.

This is why Current has the Voices feature. It's acknowledging that information is written by humans with perspectives, not just published by institutions. You follow writers. You follow publications. You follow both. The app helps you organize that.

The Byline specification is open, so other RSS readers could theoretically adopt it. It's not proprietary to Current. It's just that Current is the first to really build the user interface around it.

This gets at something deeper about how Current thinks about news consumption. It's not just "here's information." It's "here's information, and here's who wrote it, so you can follow them specifically if you like their voice."

Building a Sustainable Information Diet

One of the most interesting aspects of Current is the way it approaches sustainability. By that, I mean designing the app so that you can maintain your usage indefinitely without burning out.

Most news apps are built for addiction. They want engagement metrics to go up. They want you spending more time in the app. That's how they monetize, either through ads or through in-app purchases that only activate when you're engaged. The entire design is oriented toward maximizing time spent.

Current's business model eliminates that perverse incentive. You pay $9.99. The developer is paid. Whether you spend five minutes a day in Current or fifty minutes, the incentive structure doesn't change. That means Current can actually be designed to encourage healthy information consumption.

The river metaphor supports this. Content fades. It's gone after a few hours or days depending on type. You can't accumulate a massive pile of unread items because they automatically disappear. This sounds like a limitation, but it's actually liberation. If something important passes by and you miss it, it's okay. There will be other important things.

The rate-limiting features support this too. If a source is overwhelming you, you can tell Current to quiet them or rate-limit them. This isn't the app trying to force you to engage less. It's the app helping you maintain a sustainable amount of information input.

This is genuinely radical in the context of 2025. Most apps are fighting for your attention. Current is designed to give you high-value information without fighting for your time.

The Podcast Connection: RSS as Distribution

While Current is specifically designed for reading articles, it's worth noting that RSS's biggest success story in the last 15 years has been podcasting.

When you subscribe to a podcast in Apple Podcasts or Spotify or any other podcast app, what's actually happening in the background is RSS. Your podcast app is checking the RSS feed for that show, downloading new episodes, and updating them on your phone. The entire podcast ecosystem runs on RSS, even though most users don't think about it that way.

This is instructive. RSS didn't die. It just moved into a place where users don't think about it. It became infrastructure. The format won, even as the RSS reader market collapsed.

Current's existence suggests that RSS might be making a comeback for text content too. The format has advantages that browser feeds and algorithms don't have. It's decentralized. A single publication can control their own feed. Readers can switch apps without losing their subscriptions. There's no algorithm deciding what you see. It's just the content the publisher decided to distribute.

In an era where algorithmic feeds are increasingly criticized for filter bubbles, misinformation, and engagement manipulation, RSS looks better and better. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a different solution. And different might be exactly what we need.

Who Needs Current? And Who Might Skip It

Current is explicitly designed for people who tried RSS in the past and gave up because it felt like work. It's for people who want to stay informed without the anxiety. It's for people who like the idea of RSS (direct access to sources, no algorithm, published content organized by source) but couldn't tolerate the psychology of inbox-style readers.

It's also genuinely useful for people who already use RSS actively. If you're someone who reads five or ten or fifty feeds a day, Current still makes that experience better by removing the anxiety component. Even if you were perfectly happy with your current reader, switching to Current eliminates stress.

Where Current might not be the right fit is for people who need advanced features. If you need to search your entire archive of articles, Current might be limiting. If you need sharing features or team collaboration, Current is single-user. If you need advanced tagging or categorization beyond the five categories, you might outgrow it.

Also, and this is important: Current is Apple-only right now. iOS, iPad, and Mac. If you use Android exclusively, you can't use Current. The developer has mentioned a web version is coming, which would presumably support Android through a browser, but that's not available yet.

The $9.99 price, while reasonable, is also a slight barrier compared to free readers like NetNewsWire or Feedly's free tier. Not a huge barrier, but it means you need to be willing to spend money before you know if you'll like it. Most apps give you a free version first.

The Experience of Using Current: A Walk-Through

Let's talk about what it's actually like to use Current day-to-day.

On first launch, you see a clean, minimal interface. The river fills your screen. You're prompted to subscribe to some feeds. You can import from OPML if you have existing subscriptions, or you can start fresh. The onboarding is quick. There's no tutorial that feels endless. The app trusts that you'll understand the river metaphor pretty quickly.

Once you have subscriptions, content starts flowing in. You see headlines. You tap one, and the full text loads (fetched automatically by Current even if the feed was truncated). You read. At the end, you see a "release" button. Tap it, and you're back in the river.

Or you can just swipe left to dismiss something without reading it. That's it. No marking as read. No checking boxes. No emptying a queue.

As you use it over days and weeks, Current learns your patterns. It notices what sources you engage with and what you skip. It prompts you with suggestions. "You never read from TechCrunch. Want to unsubscribe?" Or: "You're reading everything from The Marginalian. Want to pin it?" These prompts are gentle. You can dismiss them. The app isn't being pushy.

You start creating custom currents. Maybe you create a "Big Ideas" current with long-form essays. A "Breaking" current with news sources that move fast. A "Writing" current with writing blogs and Substacks. Each current has its own river, flowing at its own pace.

The Reading List builds up gradually. When you encounter something you want to come back to, you save it. Unlike read-later services that can get overwhelmingly full, the Reading List in Current doesn't feel like a burden because there's no pressure. Items don't disappear. You come back to them when you want.

Over time, using Current stops feeling like a task and starts feeling like something you actually enjoy. There's no guilt. There's no red badge telling you that you're behind. There's just a stream of information you're choosing to engage with.

The Future of Current: Web Version and Beyond

Current is still relatively new, but the developer has already announced roadmap items. The most significant is a web version, which is currently in development.

A web version changes the calculus significantly. It means you could read Current in your browser if you wanted to. It means Android users could access it. It means you're not locked into Apple's ecosystem. The web version would presumably include the same river experience, the same design philosophy, just in a browser instead of a native app.

Beyond the web version, the roadmap is intentionally light. The developer isn't promising fifty new features. The philosophy seems to be: get the core experience right, make sure it's rock-solid, and then think about what's next. That's refreshing in an industry where feature creep is rampant.

One interesting possible direction is community features. Right now Current is single-user. But there could theoretically be ways to share currents, or to see what other people are reading, or to discover new sources through the Current community. These would be careful additions though, because they could undermine the calm, anti-addiction design. You'd have to be thoughtful about how you add social features without introducing the toxicity that comes with social apps.

Another possibility is deeper integration with other services. You could imagine Current connecting with your notes app, so you can save highlights. Or connecting with your calendar, so you can block time for reading. These are all speculative, but they'd follow naturally from Current being a well-designed tool that respects your data.

The Larger Context: Why RSS Matters in 2025

Why are we talking about RSS at all in 2025? Shouldn't we have moved past it?

In some ways, we have. As mentioned, RSS is infrastructure for podcasts. Nobody thinks about it. It just works. For text content, though, algorithms have become dominant. Most people get news from social media feeds, from algorithmic feeds in news apps, from Google News, from email newsletters. RSS is the alternative that exists outside these systems.

The algorithmic approach has some real advantages. It personalizes what you see. It can surface content you wouldn't have found yourself. It learns what you're interested in. These are not nothing.

But algorithms also have real problems. They create filter bubbles where you only see content that agrees with your existing beliefs. They optimize for engagement, which incentivizes outrage and sensationalism. They're controlled by a small number of companies who can change them at will. They create addictive patterns that are deliberately designed to keep you coming back.

RSS, by contrast, is simple, transparent, and democratic. You choose what you subscribe to. You see it in the order the publisher published it. There's no algorithm deciding what you should see. If you want to switch apps, you can take your subscriptions with you. The format is open. It's not owned by anyone.

In 2025, as tech-savvy people are increasingly aware of algorithmic manipulation and as AI-generated content is polluting feeds everywhere, RSS is looking pretty good again. It's not a new technology. It's an old technology that solves real problems.

Current's arrival suggests there might be an appetite for this return. Not from everyone, and not as a replacement for algorithmic feeds. But from people who are exhausted by algorithms and who want something different.

Making the Switch: Migrating to Current

If you're convinced that Current might be right for you, how do you actually switch?

First, you need to export your subscriptions from whatever app you're currently using. Most RSS readers support OPML export. If you're using Feedly, there's an export function in settings. If you're using NetNewsWire, same thing. If you're using Inoreader or Reeder, they all support OPML export. This typically gives you a file with all your subscriptions listed.

Then you download Current, go through the setup, and when prompted, you import your OPML file. Current reads it and subscribes you to all those feeds automatically. You're transferred over.

This takes maybe five minutes. You won't lose anything. Your subscriptions come with you.

The only thing that doesn't transfer is your read history. Current doesn't store which articles you've read, so there's nothing to import there. You're starting fresh in that sense. But honestly, that's kind of the point. Current is designed so that you don't need to worry about read history. Content ages and disappears. You're not trying to track everything you've ever seen.

So the migration is simple. The bigger transition is the psychological one. You have to let go of the idea that you need to read everything. You have to be okay with content disappearing. That's actually the hardest part, but it's also the most liberating part. Once you adjust to the river model, the traditional inbox model feels exhausting.

Potential Limitations and Honest Assessment

Current is genuinely well-designed, but it's not perfect for everyone, and it's worth being honest about the limitations.

First, the curation and discovery features are limited compared to some competitors. Feedly, for instance, has "trending" sections that show you what's getting popular across feeds. Current doesn't have that. It's not trying to surface viral content. If you want serendipitous discovery beyond what you've subscribed to, you're not getting it in Current.

Second, if you're someone who likes to archive everything and search your archive later, Current isn't built for that. The River philosophy means content ages and disappears. You can save things to Read Later, but Current isn't a searchable archive of everything you've ever encountered. If you need that functionality, Inoreader or a service like Pocket might be better.

Third, the Apple-only limitation is real. Until the web version arrives, you can't use Current on Android. If you're in the Android ecosystem, you'll need to wait or stick with something else.

Fourth, Current is a young product. The fact that there are no in-app purchases or subscriptions means the developer's revenue is bounded. If Current never grows beyond a small user base, there's a risk that development slows or the app doesn't get regular updates. This is always a risk with indie apps, but it's worth being aware of.

Finally, if you have very specific workflow needs (tagging with multiple tags, advanced filtering, API access for automation), Current won't meet those needs. It's designed for simplicity, not power-user features. That's a choice, not a flaw, but it's worth understanding.

The Economics of Building RSS Readers

One of the interesting questions is how sustainable Current actually is as a business.

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The upside is that the revenue is one-time. Every user is a customer forever, not a subscription that could be cancelled. The downside is that growth is limited. You can't extract more money from your users. If you want to grow revenue, you need to grow the user base.

This is radically different from subscription models, where you can optimize for customer lifetime value, implement price increases, upsell to premium tiers, etc. Current doesn't have those levers. It just has the number of people willing to pay $9.99 once.

This economic model actually aligns perfectly with good software design. There's no incentive to bloat the app with unnecessary features. There's no incentive to introduce dark patterns to increase engagement. The app just needs to be good enough that people want to pay for it.

Compare that to venture-backed RSS readers that have tried subscription models. Many of them have failed to retain users because the subscription felt like an unjustified recurring charge for something that feels like it should be free or cheap. Current's one-time purchase feels more fair and more aligned with the value being delivered.

The Larger Movement: Calm Technology

Current fits into a broader movement in tech called "calm technology" or sometimes "slow tech." The idea is that not all software should be trying to maximize engagement and capture your attention. Some software should be designed to get out of your way, to support your goals quietly, and to respect your time and mental energy.

Other examples of calm tech include things like Notion (which is productivity software that doesn't try to manipulate you into spending time in it), Obsidian (a note-taking app designed for personal knowledge management, not for building a community), and Hey (an email app that's designed to reduce email anxiety rather than increase engagement).

The common thread is intentional design philosophy. These apps are saying: we're not trying to be platforms. We're not trying to extract maximum value from your attention. We're trying to solve a specific problem well.

Current is part of this movement. The design philosophy, the one-time purchase price, the absence of dark patterns, the focus on reducing anxiety rather than increasing engagement. These are all consistent with calm technology principles.

In an era where most tech is fighting for your attention, calm technology is genuinely countercultural. And it's finding an audience. People are tired of being manipulated by software. The idea of software that actually respects your time and mental energy is appealing.

Real-World Usage Patterns and Community Response

While Current is new, early users are reporting genuinely positive experiences. The common theme is how much less stressful it feels compared to traditional RSS readers.

People who have used RSS for years and then switched to algorithmic feeds report feeling less informed. They know what they're getting is algorithmically curated, but they don't know what they're missing. They feel passive. RSS readers give you the sense that you're actively choosing what sources matter to you.

But they also report guilt from the unread count. Even people who intellectually know they don't need to read everything still feel that psychological pressure. Current removes that pressure by removing the unread count and introducing the river metaphor where content naturally disappears.

The other observation is that people spend less time in Current than in news apps or social media feeds, but they feel more informed. They're reading more substantive content. The average article in an RSS feed is longer and more thoughtful than the average social media post. And without algorithmic amplification of viral content, you're seeing a broader spectrum of sources rather than just what's trending.

This is early feedback from a small user base, so it's not definitive. But the sentiment is consistent enough to suggest the product is solving a real problem for the people it's designed for.

The Philosophy: What Current Gets Right

At its core, Current understands something important about information consumption in the modern world.

We have access to more information than any human in history. We can read the best writing from around the world instantly. We can follow experts and journalists and writers we respect. RSS is actually a fantastic solution for accessing all that information.

But we've organized that access through frameworks borrowed from email and social media. And those frameworks import psychological patterns that don't actually make sense for news and information consumption.

Email unread counts make sense. Someone might actually be waiting for your response. News unread counts don't make sense. Nobody's waiting. Nothing bad happens if you don't read that article. But we kept the visual language anyway, and it created anxiety.

Current solves that by changing the metaphor. Instead of an inbox, it's a river. Instead of trying to reach zero, you're just floating along and reading what interests you. Instead of trying to keep up with everything, you accept that content passes. That's just how rivers work.

It's a simple idea, but it's profound in its implications. It changes how you interact with information. It reduces anxiety. It makes the experience sustainable. It removes the sense of obligation.

That's not a minor thing. For people who want to stay informed but don't want the psychological burden, Current is genuinely innovative.

Conclusion: The Return of RSS

Current isn't the first new RSS reader in 2025. But it might be the one that actually makes a difference. Not by adding more features, but by fundamentally rethinking the user experience around a different metaphor.

The timing is interesting. We're in an era where algorithmic feeds have proven they're not neutral. They're tools for engagement and manipulation. We're in an era where AI is generating vast amounts of content, polluting the information environment. We're in an era where people are increasingly skeptical of centralized platforms.

In that context, RSS looks pretty good. It's decentralized. It's transparent. It's not manipulated by algorithms. It's under your control.

Current takes RSS and makes it accessible to the people who find traditional readers stressful. It solves the anxiety problem. It keeps the benefits of RSS (direct access to sources, your choice of what to subscribe to, no algorithm) while removing the psychological burden.

At $9.99, it's a low-risk experiment. If you've ever been interested in RSS but couldn't tolerate the traditional inbox approach, Current is genuinely worth trying. You might discover that calm, intentional information consumption feels better than algorithmic feeds. You might realize you don't actually need to see everything. You might find that reading becomes less of a task and more of something you actually enjoy.

The success of Current would suggest that there's still an appetite for RSS, even after two decades of algorithmic dominance. Not as a replacement for social media, but as an alternative for people who want to stay informed without the manipulation.

And in 2025, that might be exactly what we need.