For me the main point is, syncronization. Point is I want to read on my phone, or if i go to another computer catch up on it. If I set up a seperate RSS reader on each, then I’d have to figure out what’s read and what’s not. Honestly that’s a feature that google reader really had me spoiled in, I loved being able to use a work computer, browse through my rss feeds, star articles that I thought I may want to come back to, go home look at the starred ones and then go back.

Then google reader shut down, and I wanted to be able to do the same again, while also not being vulnerable to another shut down.

Telemetry is one reason.

Not having to worry about the service shutting down (Google Reader) is another.

Synced read status is a common one as well.

You may also use it in combination with another service to create RSS feeds for sites that dont have one.

Honestly having it not just get killed like Google Reader is a big chunk of the userbase.

I can access my RSS feeds on multiple devices without losing track of what I’ve already read.

Oh I can actually answer something, neat.

I thought I was missing the appeal too, but when I got back into tabletop roleplaying games, a lot of the community is located over on Substack blogs, and I don’t like Substack. My solution was to start running FreshRSS and put all of the feeds into it so I could read at my own pace, and also not have to go to a million sites to keep track of content. Saves me a lot of tabs in an internet browser, if nothing else.

Sadly, not all sites or blogs have RSS feeds to hand out, but I’ve used https://openrss.org/ to get around that for the most part if they don’t.