RSS never died. It just got left behind by the tools built around it.
Today we're launching Overtone, an RSS reader for the way people actually read in 2026. Not a reverse-chronological list of unread items. A reader that knows when multiple sources are covering the same story and ranks it accordingly.
The problem with traditional RSS
If you follow more than a handful of feeds, you know the feeling: hundreds of unread items, no idea what's actually important, a nagging guilt about falling behind. Most readers give you two options. Read everything, or declare inbox bankruptcy.
Overtone offers a third: Volume.
What is Volume?
Volume is a hot list. It detects when multiple sources cover the same topic. The more feeds that write about something, the louder it gets in your Volume view.
Overtone doesn't just match URLs. It uses semantic clustering (AI embeddings) to group stories by meaning. Two articles about the same event, completely different URLs and headlines, will still cluster together.
Signal and Noise
Every feed you subscribe to gets classified as either Signal (must-reads, weighted at 1.0) or Noise (high-volume background sources, weighted at 0.5). Your Signal feeds are the sources you trust. Your Noise feeds are the crowd: useful in aggregate for spotting trends, but not individually demanding your attention.
Social feeds, built in
Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and 900+ other platforms are available as RSS feeds through our integrated RSSHub instance. No external services, no separate subscriptions. Paste a social media URL and Overtone converts it to a pollable feed automatically.
Communities
Communities let you create shared reading groups with collective Volume rankings. Build your own Techmeme for any topic: your team, your research group, your hobby circle.
If that sounds useful, try it.