This is the first post on this blog, which feels a little odd to write. It's an announcement for a feed reader that, if it's doing its job, you'll mostly forget is running. So I'll keep it modest.
/feed is a small, private RSS and Atom reader for the open web. You add the sites and people you want to follow, and it shows you what they publish — in order, without an algorithm deciding what you "should" see. That's really the whole pitch. It's not trying to be a platform or reinvent reading. It just tries to stay out of the way.
The ideas behind it
None of these are original, and that's sort of the point.
- The open web still works. RSS quietly survived, and a surprising amount of the internet still publishes a feed. We wanted a comfortable place to read it.
- No ranking, no engagement tricks. Chronological order, sources you chose. Nothing is optimised to keep you scrolling.
- Your reading is yours. We try to collect as little as possible and keep what there is private. Reading shouldn't feel observed.
- Boring on purpose. It's meant to be calm and fast and to do one job well, rather than pile on features nobody asked for.
- No lock-in. OPML import/export, and Fever- and Miniflux-compatible APIs, so you can bring your feeds in and take them elsewhere whenever you like.
I'm sure we've gotten some of this wrong, and we'll keep adjusting as we learn.
Where we hope to go
A roadmap feels like a strong word for what is really a list of things we'd like to get to. No dates, and no promises — some of this may change or quietly fall off the list.
- Smoothing out the mobile apps and the browser extensions.
- Better full-content fetching for sites that only publish summaries.
- Making newsletters-as-feeds a little nicer to live with.
- Gentle, opt-in ways to get notified (Telegram, Slack, Discord, ntfy, webhooks) without turning your reader into another notification firehose.
- Writing more openly about how it's built on the engineering blog.
If you try /feed and something annoys you — or you just have a thought — I'd genuinely like to hear it. That kind of feedback is what shapes the list above far more than any plan of ours.
Thanks for reading. I hope it's useful, and otherwise unremarkable, in the best possible way.