WordPress.com has turned its Reader into a free RSS reader for almost everything: blogs, newsletters, YouTube, Tumblr, Bluesky and Mastodon, side by side. For Europe’s small businesses it is a free newsstand that only stocks what you choose.
FROM THE EDITORS
Every town used to have a newsstand where the owner kept your papers aside. The trade weekly, the local paper, the magazine from the next country over, folded and waiting. You did not hunt for them. They came to you.
The WordPress.com Reader is that newsstand, rebuilt for 2026. It is free, it needs only a free WordPress.com account and no website of your own, and it lives at wordpress.com/reader on the web and in the Jetpack app for iPhone and Android. “It’s one calm place for everything you read,” WordPress.com writes.
What you can put on the shelf
- Blogs. Any WordPress site, and any other site that publishes an RSS feed.
- Newsletters. Including Substack, which gets its own tab, so you can read them without filling your inbox.
- YouTube channels. Paste the channel address and new videos arrive in a YouTube tab.
- Tumblr. With its own tab as well.
- Bluesky. Connect your account to see your whole timeline under Social feeds, or paste one profile address to follow a single person. You can like, repost, reply and post from the Reader.
- Mastodon. The same two options as Bluesky.
- Anything else with a feed. If it publishes RSS, it can go in. That includes most podcasts, although the Reader does not list them as a separate source.
Some big names are missing. X, the former Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok and Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and Threads are not on the list, because none of them offers an open feed for a reader to collect. Posts there still have to be read where they are published. Two have side doors. Threads profiles that switch on fediverse sharing can be followed from Mastodon, so they may turn up in a connected Mastodon timeline. Pinterest has long published RSS feeds for profiles and boards, so pasting one of those feed addresses may well work. And one item is leaving the shelf: Reddit was part of the original announcement, but WordPress.com says the Reader will drop it by 13 November, when Reddit is expected to switch off its RSS feeds.
How it keeps the pile tidy
Each site and list shows an unread count in the sidebar, read posts fade, and you can mark everything read in one click. Shelves are private collections with their own colour, icon and layout, so suppliers, competitors and trade press can each have their own. Moving from another reader takes one OPML file, and what you follow syncs between the web and the app. Apps such as Reeder and ReadKit can sync too.
Why it matters for a small firm
For a firm in Porto or Poznań, keeping an eye on the market usually means a dozen tabs, three newsletters and a social feed nobody has time for. One free shelf changes that. A supplier’s product blog, an industry newsletter, a trade fair’s YouTube channel and the Bluesky accounts of the people who matter in your sector can all sit together, read in ten minutes over coffee.
There is a quieter benefit too. WordPress.com says that last month, bloggers with no subscribers who followed or commented on other blogs through the Reader were about ten times more likely to win their first subscriber. Reading turns out to be a good way to be read.
What to try this week
- Build one shelf. Five sources you check every week: two suppliers, one trade newsletter, one competitor, one YouTube channel.
- Bring your old list. If you already use a feed reader, export the OPML file and import it.
- Add the people, not just the brands. Follow a few named experts on Bluesky or Mastodon by pasting their profile address.
- Add us. Paste signaldigital.net into the Reader and Signal Digital lands on your shelf next to everything else.
The internet spent a decade sorting what we read for us. A good newsstand did the opposite: it kept what you asked for. That is worth having again, especially when it costs nothing.
Sources
- WordPress.com, “A Free RSS Reader for Blogs, Bluesky, and Mastodon”, 6 Oct 2026 — https://wordpress.com/blog/2026/10/06/free-rss-reader/
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