Get You an RSS Reader that Displays Tags

I'm sure all of you have already read my Apologia for RSS (the very first post on this blog!) and I'm sure you're all reading this in an RSS reader you've chosen for one reason or another. But does your RSS reader show you everything a post contains, or is it hiding the deepest, juiciest quips and chatter from you?

I've been on Tumblr since its heyday back in 2011, and it's now the only social media I can really say I use regularly^[1]. One of the aspects of its culture I appreciate tremendously is the concept of "chatting in the tags". Tags in Tumblr are snippets of text attached to both posts and reblogs, but only the original instance. If you reblog a post, that reblog doesn't include the tags of whoever you reblogged it from.

Although tags were presumably intended primarily for cross-referencing posts on the same topic, Tumblr culture has adopted them as a way of writing sotto voce commentary on posts, visible only to people who are following you specifically without escaping into the larger network. Sometimes people use this to be funny, sometimes to relay anecdotes, sometimes to be catty. Universally, it gives a window into the personality of the person you chose to follow, above and beyond just their curatorial decisions about what to post.

Even on one's own posts, tag chatter provides a means of adding a bit of commentary that's tangential to the post itself, of a different tone, or a little more personal than they want escaping into the wider network.

One of Tumblr's virtues, and in fact one of the main reasons I still use it at all, is that it provides RSS feeds for every user. These are the main way I read the website at all! What's more, these feeds actually contain that user's tags. For the technically-minded among you, the feed entry looks like this:

<item>
  <title>
    gonna be a lover for a minute, reblog and put in the tags the last movie that you LOVED like&hellip;
  </title>
  <description>
    <p><a class="tumblr_blog" href="https://perfectday1972.tumblr.com/post/792148193180827649/gonna-be-a-lover-for-a-minute-reblog-and-put-in">perfectday1972</a>:</p><blockquote><p>gonna be a lover for a minute, reblog and put in the tags the last movie that you LOVED like intensely loved like 5 stars on letterboxd LOVED</p></blockquote>
  </description>
  <link>https://www.tumblr.com/nex3/824507509470625792</link>
  <guid>https://www.tumblr.com/nex3/824507509470625792</guid>
  <pubDate>Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:40:35 -0700</pubDate>
  <category>PlayTime</category>
  <category>although todayhat was a rewatch</category>
  <category>most recent new one was Chimes at Midnight</category>
</item>

Those <category> elements are the tags. Neat! But totally useless in practice unless a reader actually displays them.

My blog, the one you're reading right now, has tags as well. Not only that, I use them for chatter just like on Tumblr! And, naturally, they're included in my feed as well. But I worry that people who subscribe to that feed won't see them, because most RSS readers hide them entirely.

A Half-Hearted Recommendation

My current RSS reader is NewsBlur. There are things I like a lot about it, like the ability to natively convert emails to feeds, a solid mobile app, and of course the ability to see tags. There are also things I don't like so much, like the awkward UI^[2] and the willingness to capitulate to the mania du jour and add LLM features.

Its failings aside, NewsBlur is still the best reader software I've found after a decent amount of searching, and I'd much rather put up with its foibles than lose out on the ability to see what my friends have to say about their posts and reblogs. If you feel the same way, I'd recommend giving it a try. It's entirely fine!

Even if you don't, I encourage you to reach out and file a feature request with whatever reader you do use to add some way of seeing tags. If enough people want it, then maybe it'll even happen!

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1. I can't say I recommend it, since the owners (as for all profitable social media) regularly do heinous shit like banning trans women for talking about how often they ban trans women. Their sole virtue is that they're less eager to fuck up the good things they have going than the rest of the social media bourgeoisie. ↩︎

2. I really liked the UI of the late great Google Reader, and I don't entirely understand why more readers don't just copy it wholesale. I have yet to find one that does and also meets my other criteria^[3]. ↩︎

3. I must not implement an RSS reader. Implementing an RSS reader is the time-killer. Implementing an RSS reader is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my ideal RSS reader. I will let it pass over and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the ideal RSS reader has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. ↩︎