One thing that’s still not clear to me (even after reviewing the documentation) is: when does the countdown start for the “decay” (can’t think of a better term at the moment) of an individual item in the River?
Does decay start from (a) the published date/time in the feed, or (b) when the item from the feed lands on Current, or (c) something else?
If I don’t open Current for two weeks (let’s say I go on vacation or just take a break from RSS):
For (a), since decay is based on the feed item published date, I would expect to only see items published in the past 7 days (for feeds marked as Evergreen). Other feeds would only show items published within their velocity threshold.
For (b), since decay is based on when Current first “sees” the item, then I would expect to have at least an opportunity to catch up.
I suppose for high volume feeds (b) would still “clog up the feed” which is one of the problems Current is supposed to solve. At this point I just want to understand this better, and in this example scenario I would still want the opportunity to catch up with my favourite sources, which Current might not provide.
The answer for now might be: If you need to catch up, use another app. I don’t want that to be the answer since I’m really enjoying the experience of Current.
(For what it’s worth, I’m using Current on a single device [an iPad] with Feedbin.)
Hello! Velocity is based on the publish time of the article, i.e. whatever the rss feed says the publish time is. I will be introducing a way to add custom age out times / velocities which should help a lot here. Would that work?
I struggle with this myself. On the one hand, I don’t want my river clogged up with garbage, so I have a lot of Breaking (3h) or News (8h) sources. But on the other hand, I only get to read current once a day, so that means I’m missing articles when I open it based on how I understood your description of age. Yet, any one of those Breaking or News articles could be the most important article of the day.
My choice of Age assigns an implicit level of Importance, which I don’t think should be the case. Age is about cleansing my river of cruft. But right now I have to choose Ages that are longer than 24 hours to ensure that I do not miss anything. I think I’d prefer the option to calculate age from the time when Current first sees the article vs publishing time. This would ensure I at least get an opportunity to see every article.
Thoughts? Or am I missing something philosophically?
I’m in a similar boat, I ended up updating all my feeds to use either Essay or Evergreen. Because it’s actually not about going away for 2 weeks, but 24 hours, as you said. At least for most of the currently available velocity settings and how things work today.
This is quite interesting actually - maybe velocity is since YOU’ve seen it, not when current saw it (background refresh, etc) or when it was published. Interesting…