A channel, a podcast and a weblog do not become one thing by being followed in one place. Ensemble arranges them rather than blending them, keeps what each one published in its own words, and leaves you to decide what is worth the time.
A feed is a list of links to things somewhere else, and what this library has to show about each one is whether you have already had it. A page of links, and a colour that changes once you have followed one, are both older than every product this is an alternative to, and both are the right shape for the data. So the library is drawn as a document, and so is this page.
Purple carries a dotted rule under it as well, because blue and purple sit within two points of each other in luminance and a colour on its own is not a signal.
A channel is watched, a podcast is listened to and a weblog is read, and none of those is the same act. The kind travels with the source, so what is drawn for one is not what is drawn for another and the list never pretends they are interchangeable.
Follow something with nine years behind it and you get a backlog, not four hundred unread things. No badge, no number that rises while you are away, and nothing marked at rest that means nothing. What you have had is yours to forget.
What a publisher wrote is kept as they wrote it. Where a feed leaves a field out, a rule can fill it from the source's own pages, and a rule says which shape the field is in rather than what its value is.
A rule is tried against pages already held before it is switched on, so proposing five of them costs the source nothing. One that would write over something the feed already said has to be confirmed.
OPML in and out. The list you bring is followed in one go, and the list you take away is the same file, which is what makes this a place you are staying rather than a place you are kept.
One search over every source you follow, answering from the whole catalogue rather than from what happens to be on offer today. The thing you half remember from two years ago is in there.
A part-watched recording resumes where you left it. Where the publisher wrote divisions into the feed, they are yours to jump to, and nothing is fetched from anywhere to learn them.
Ensemble is one of the libraries Orchestra carries, and a daemon serves whichever of them you installed. On its own it is a reader. Beside the other two it shares the same profiles, the same settings screen and the same front door.
Ensemble does not host or publish anything. It reads the feeds a publisher offers and plays what the publisher put in them. Pictures and media are fetched by your own daemon, so drawing a page does not introduce your browser to anybody.
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