The feed is here:
https://north.engineer/index.xml
Paste that into any feed reader. That’s the whole setup.
There’s no newsletter signup wall, no “allow notifications,” no account. I don’t know who subscribes and I don’t need to.
Why a feed instead of a follow button
A feed reader is a piece of software that checks a list of websites and shows you what’s new. That’s it. It sounds unremarkable until you notice what it doesn’t do.
It shows you everything you asked for. Not a sample. Not the engagement-optimized subset. If a site you subscribe to publishes eleven things, you see eleven things.
It shows you nothing you didn’t. No suggested accounts, no “people also read,” no outrage from an adjacent community selected because it keeps you scrolling.
It’s in the order things happened. Chronological. The most recent thing is the most recent thing.
Nobody is measuring you. The reader fetches a file. There’s no session, no profile accumulating in the background, no advertiser learning what you read at midnight.
It survives. RSS is a published specification. Atom is RFC 4287, an actual internet standard. No company owns them. No company can deprecate them, change the terms, or decide your reading list is now a product. Sites will die — that’s fine, that’s always been true. But the mechanism isn’t going anywhere, because it isn’t anyone’s to take away.
That last one is why RSS gets its own section on this site. It’s the same argument as Markdown, and the same argument as open firmware: the format you choose is a bet about the future. Feeds are the version of that bet you can place on your own reading.
The honest trade-off
Feeds are worse at some things and I’d rather say so than oversell it.
There’s no discovery. A social timeline shows you people you’ve never heard of; a feed reader shows you exactly the sites you already added. Building a good subscription list takes months and some deliberate effort. Nobody does it for you.
There’s no conversation. You read, and that’s the end of it. If you want to argue about a post you have to go somewhere else.
And plenty of sites don’t publish feeds anymore, which means some things you want simply aren’t available this way without effort.
If what you want from the internet is serendipity and company, a feed reader is the wrong tool. If what you want is to read specific things carefully, on purpose, without being managed — it’s the right one. I use both. They’re different activities.
What I use
NetNewsWire on Mac and iOS. Free, open source, native, and under no pressure to grow. It syncs if you want it to and works entirely locally if you don’t. No subscription, no account required, no upsell.
There are plenty of good alternatives — self-hosted aggregators like FreshRSS or Miniflux if you’d rather own the whole pipeline, and several solid hosted options. Any of them beats not having one. Pick the one you’ll actually open.
Starting from nothing
Add three sites you already read. That’s enough to make the habit stick. Check it once a day rather than continuously — it isn’t a timeline and it doesn’t reward being watched.
The list grows on its own after that. In a year you’ll have something no algorithm would ever have assembled for you, because you assembled it.