This solves a problem that has haunted every chronological feed since Google Reader: a single prolific source drowning out everything else. When The Verge posts twenty articles in a day, those articles age out in hours. When Craig Mod publishes once a month, that essay stays in your river for days. Because it was meant to.
I currently use Readwise Reader as an RSS client. I subscribe to some 600 feeds, which I've sorted cleanly into folders, and use the tagging and highlighting features of Reader to go through all my feeds, tag what I want to write about, and save what I want to read later. But this system is not for everyone, as it gets overwhelming quickly (and lately, I would have argued it's not even for me).
So I am quite intrigued by Current by Terry Godier. Instead of simply listing all RSS items like an inbox, it replaces it with a "river" where content naturally decays and disappears based on its "velocity".
Terry again:
Each article has a velocity, a measure of how quickly it ages. Breaking news burns bright for three hours. A daily article stays relevant for eighteen. An essay lingers for three days. An evergreen tutorial might sit in your river for a week.
As items age, they dim. Eventually they're gone, carried downstream. You don't mark them as read. You don't file them. They simply pass, the way water passes under a bridge.
You select the "velocity" during the onboarding journey, by assigning one of five speeds (Breaking, News, Article, Essay, or Evergreen) to each individual RSS source.
Currently, Current only exists for Apple's ecosystem, and by paying $9.99 you can use the app on an iPad, iPhone and Mac.
I hope a Linux version is in the works. I don't read feeds on my iPhone after all.
