February 4, 2025
Tapestry weaves RSS and social media, for better or worse
As if the random chaos in your social media and RSS feeds wasn’t enough on a per-platform basis, now you can get it all mingled together in a one big feed.
A new app called Tapestry combines RSS feeds with Youtube, Reddit, Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr and podcasts. Even if you don’t subscribe to much, it can make for a massive list. On the up side, it might give you the wake-up call you need to pare back.
Still, if massive mingling is what you want, Tapestry does it about as well as can be expected, with the designers at The Icon Factory making it a pleasure to use. I like, for example, that the platforms are colour-coded so you can easily pick them out. Bluesky, of course, is blue. And Reddit is, well, red.
The new version of Reeder also combines RSS and social media, though, and I’ll be sticking with that. I like its understated elegance and the options to customize the main feed. For example, I follow Techmeme’s RSS, but keep its firehose separate from what Reeder calls the home feed. I allow just one of the subreddits I follow into the home feed.
Both Tapestry and Reeder work best for lurkers. If you like to use social media to socialize, you need to make an extra tap to go the website in the in-app browser. And at that point you may wonder why you used an app in the first place.
The basics of Tapestry are free, but you may be enticed by a universal filter that comes with the subscription. Sick of U.S. politics? Gone! I’d love to see this feature in Reeder. I’m currently forced to use a web service called siftrss that only works on one feed at a time.
Tapestry is available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad.