Hi there,

First of all, thank you so much for expressing interest in Morgenblau! I myself obviously thought that it would be a cool product to build but seeing so many people react positively to my first couple of posts over on Bluesky really made me even more excited to work on this.

A special shoutout goes out to Tim, the creator of Skyreader. He already reached out to me in private regarding the shared lexicon we use. I find it really cool how the Atmosphere enables things like this: Independent people can essentially build the same app for the same data but with a different interface. Which other ecosystem makes this possible?

A bit of housekeeping

My goal for Morgenblau is to build it in public and document as much of the process as possible. This way, all the decisions I take are transparent, and you can also help me with them and shape the product. The code will of course be open source too.

Morgenblau will be an opinionated product and I don’t have the illusion that it will be a perfect fit for everyone. But I do hope that for the people that like the concept, it comes as close to the perfect RSS application as possible.

I don’t really have a fixed schedule for this devlog, I’ll just write an update whenever I think it makes sense. For more frequent updates, you can always check my Bluesky profile or my personal website.

Core concepts

I already shared the visuals below on Bluesky, but I wanted to go a bit more in depth here so you get a feel of what makes Morgenblau different from other RSS readers.

Three distinct views of the Atmosphere

Classic RSS readers are exactly that: Readers. They don’t enable content discovery, and they also don’t allow you to create content yourself – they are just a way to consume.

Of course, the main purpose of Morgenblau will still be consumption, that’s what I’m optimizing for as that’ll probably be the biggest use case.

But I also want to make sure users really benefit from the cool things that ATProto enables.

For discovery, I already have multiple ideas:

• See, what content people you follow liked and shared.
• Find new feeds via the users you follow: For example via the content on their PDS (e.g. a Leaflet publication), their username (if that website has an RSS feed), links they have in their Bluesky bio, etc.
• Extract links from posts from your feed, kind of like Sill does it for Bluesky posts.

The idea for the creation view came from a personal need of mine: I want to post to Bluesky without having to open the app and potentially getting distracted by an endless stream of posts. I think in the beginning, posting to Bluesky will be the only way to create content, but I can easily see this also allowing posting long-form content with the standard.site lexicon, for example.

Daily digests instead of an endless list

This part was hugely inspired by this great essay by Terry that you should definitely read if you haven’t already. It poses the question of why exactly almost all RSS readers have an interface that resembles Email clients almost 1-to-1? And why do we feel the “Phantom Obligation” to “work” through all the unread posts?

I currently use the Reeder Classic app and I often get to this point as well where I don’t check the app for a couple of days, and then I’m overwhelmed by the amount of content that I “have to get through”. The dev of Reeder also saw this problem, and the new version doesn’t have the notion of “unread” articles anymore. But this concept also didn’t really work for me, since it felt too much like any other social media feed.

My solution that I want to try out for Morgenblau is the concept of “Daily Digests”. Kind of like a snapshot of all the content that was posted on that day. I imagine the users of the app for example sitting down in the evening with a cup of tea and going through the content that was published during the day. Or drinking their morning coffee while checking what was posted on the previous day.

This way, each day becomes a finite bucket of content that doesn’t overwhelm you. It organizes the whole stream of content without having to rely on unread counts but also not on an endless feed.

Social layer on top of RSS

This is probably the most obvious benefit that ATProto enables. For each piece of content, the app can check for backlinks from around the Atmosphere and display them alongside it. This makes RSS feel way more interactive and – depending on the type of content – likely elevates the experience quite a bit.

Leaflet showed us how cool it is that comments on ATProto are not siloed to a specific platform but visible to everyone on different parts of the network. I want to continue that spirit with Morgenblau.

From a UI perspective, I still want to have the main focus on the reading experience itself, though. It should enable you to view reactions to a post only if you'd like to, but hide them if you don’t.

Four first class citizens

The new Reeder already does this very well: It supports not only regular blogposts but also microposts without a title, videos, and podcasts. Morgenblau will support the same content types.

I think it just makes sense. RSS is a way to consume content in a way you control. This doesn’t stop at just blogposts.

Of course, every RSS reader allows you to input feeds of podcasts or YouTube channels. But I want to make sure that you can actually consume this content in the app as well, in an interface, that is optimized for it.

I would rather not bloat the app with too many features, though. For example, a heavy podcast consumer will probably still want to use a dedicated player. But I want to bring it to a state where it supports the 20% of features, that make up 80% of the experience.

As you can see, Morgenblau won’t really be a classic RSS reader. I’m still figuring out what to call it and definitely open to suggestions. It’s more like a content platform enabled by RSS and ATProto, but that right there doesn’t exactly roll off your tongue.

In short, everything revolves around these “Modes”, that I already outlined above:

• Discover new websites and cool people
• Consume content in a non-addictive and non-stressful, but calm way
• Create your own content without getting sucked into your timeline like on classic social media apps

A question for you

I want to finish each issue of this devlog with a question to you to a) get to know you better and b) learn more about how I can make Morgenblau better for you.

So my question to you for today is:

What aspect of an ATProto-based RSS reader excites you the most vs. just a regular Reader?

Just reply to this email with your answer (or any other feedback/ideas you have of course).

Appendix: Further reading

I thought it would be fun to leave you with a few older posts from my blog that broadly relate to Morgenblau, ATProto and the Open Web in general. They are sorted from old to new, pick what sounds intriguing :)

• Adapting to the Algorithm
• YouTube is amazing, but…
• My personal home on the internet
• Diving into the Fediverse (once again…)
• Diving into the Atmosphere
• My social home on the internet
• A more social IndieWeb
• My new personal home on the internet
• And of course, the post that kicked off this project, if you haven’t read that one yet: Change of plans

Talk to you soon, Dominik