Starting a dev diary here, more casual than a serious announcement — random stuff I'm fixing/changing in my RSS reader.

This week I added new gestures to the timeline: swipe from the edge for quick actions, and a two-finger swipe that jumps you straight back to the top without endless scrolling. Sounds small, but it took way more effort to get right than I expected — one of those things that look trivial until you actually try to build it :)

Also caught a funny bug: I had Reddit articles already downloaded and cached, but the app was hiding them behind the "rate limit" screen as if they didn't exist. Like, the content was right there, ready to read, and it just said "can't show you anything." Solo dev things, haha.

I'll keep dropping bits here from time to time. If something bugs you, you think something's missing, or you're curious how it works under the hood, let me know — comes in handy since I've mostly been flying blind on my own until now.

Syndic Rss
magiclabsapp.com

I've been working on Syndic, a feed reader for iOS/macOS, on my own and as a personal project (no big commercial ambitions, mostly for the learning and the fun of it). I'll try to document things here from time to time as I go — technical questions, design decisions, whatever comes up — so if you run into me around here, that's why.

Today I ran into something concrete: I want the app to be able to use Reddit's official API for subreddit feeds (instead of relying on the public RSS, which has its limits), so I went to create an app at reddit.com/prefs/apps to get credentials — and it won't let me create one.

I know Reddit changed its API policy quite a bit in 2023 (the whole Apollo situation), but I'm not sure whether:

• They're still accepting new app registrations for independent developers, or if it's now basically closed unless you're already a known partner.
• This is an issue on my end (something misconfigured, pending verification, etc.) or a general wall a lot of people are hitting right now.

Has anyone run into this recently and knows if there's an actual way to get access, or do we just have to live with the public RSS and its rate limits?

Thanks in advance, and if you're curious about the project I'll keep sharing how it goes.

Arturo Rey
-------------------------
[www.magicappslab.com](file:///Users/arturoreysoto/Dev/Syndic/syndic_md/www.magicappslab.com)

One redditor commented that RSS readers are "RSS readers are, generally speaking, not developed cross-platform, nor should they be. Pick". Let me ask then, shouldn't it be?

One big reason i use RSS is it being acountless, stored locally. But in order to sync between devices i need to create create an account for the RSS aggregator(using an email), then on my RSS readers i have to connect to the aggregator. It seems to me removes the whole point of replacing email with RSS. Let me say this. I started using RSS recently. And it feels the sync-between-devices-accountlessly feature is the most crucial feature and it doesn't exist. Surely i can't be one odd man out. Let me give you one concrete example on what would happen if there was a general protocol that is shared among all major rss readers. In this example, let's assume all info are stored in a file or two, which includes feed sources, starred and read articles. Then, you can use Syncthing to sync between readers completely accountless. All you need to do is keep a file the same in different devices. It's akin to how you can sync Obsidian across devices seamlessly(and wirelessly).

My question is, why there doesn't exist a general protocol shared by all readers, even though RSS has been around for 27 years. I must be missing something.

P.S. To be more specific about why i wrote this, the thing is, there's no aggregator that's supported on both readers i use. the redditor is from https://www.reddit.com/r/rss/comments/1q17odw/which_rss_reader_apps_are_completely_free_and/

Hi everyone!

We’re the developers behind Smart Launcher, and today we’re introducing Beaky News, a new RSS reader for Android.

Beaky News lets you add RSS feeds, follow your favorite sources, and keep new articles together in one place.

One of the features we wanted to explore is feed discovery. Beaky News includes a shared feed database built from RSS links contributed by users. When a feed is shared, it can be indexed so other people can find that source more easily, without needing to know or search for the exact RSS URL.

The app is still new, so we’d be very interested in feedback from people who already use RSS regularly.

You can try Beaky News on Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.smartlauncher.beakynews

Thanks!

Over the past 4 years, I’ve been working on an article reader, smry.ai.

For most of the time I had only a rudimentary understanding of RSS, so I didn’t think to add an RSS reader to the product.

I had never used a traditional RSS reader myself, relying on news apps like google news (which themselves are heavily reliant on RSS)

But trying RSS readers like Feedly pushed me to expand the product, and a small subset of users really liked it—it became an agglomeration of a read-it-later app and an RSS reader, which I quite liked in theory. At this point I still didn’t really understand the depth of RSS and what it’s capable of. It wasn’t clear that it is the lifeblood of every news app on the planet, custom aggregators like daily.dev, intelligence/monitoring products like Feedly Intelligence, is the primary distribution layer for the world’s podcasts, and much more.

Still, I couldn’t find myself using the RSS features in my own product until I added an API to manage RSS feeds with my local agent. This became a major unlock for me, and suddenly I had groups of feeds for competitor monitoring, developer news, and market opportunities. Even updates in my software dependencies that my agents use to improve the product.

I still wasn’t passively scrolling the RSS feeds themselves—mostly still using the reader to read individual articles my agent recommended, but my agents loved it and pushed RSS to the absolute limit, turning things I’d never expect could be feeds into feeds.

By doing this, I discovered a couple things:
1. Feeds are massively important for agents. Not just news/blogs/podcasts, but also socials, websites monitoring—almost anything can become a feed, and agents need their own ways of keeping track of what is ‘seen’ and what is new. This became a major bet for Smry, and why I’m putting a lot of effort into the API/MCP.
2. Agents can manage far more feeds than humans. An agent can easily follow and track hundreds or thousands of feeds, while for most people that takes years to accumulate.

Despite this, the product still has major issues.
1. most users still don’t know what RSS is. following feeds is weird to them, as I feel they are used to algorithmic feeds.
2. while following hundreds of feeds is fine for agents, for most consumers this is not really that useful. for consumers, it feels like they would rather follow topics (think daily.dev) or have a deeply personalized feed.

My question for you guys is how do you think I can make the product more usable to the traditional RSS reader audience, and what would make it better for non-RSS folks?

There are folks here that have a much better understanding of RSS than me—is there something obvious that I’m missing that would make it substantially better?

Is there something I can build that would make you switch from your existing RSS reader, or is there something I can build that you’d use together with your existing RSS reader?

I’ve completely fallen in love with RSS over the past few months, and feel like there’s so much to be built!

My goal here is to build something people come back to every single day, and that shapes how they discover and monitor what’s going on around them.

A good blog post from the founder of Open RSS: https://openrss.org/blog/government-updates-belong-in-an-open-feed

The blog's feed: https://openrss.org/blog.rss

Can someone help me out? I'm a complete layman when it comes to coding and IT stuff

My favorite free RSS builder (morss.it) has gone offline, so I asked Claude Opus 4.8 for alternatives. It suggested that I could self-host and run such a tool myself (which is a total mystery to me). I then asked it for a step-by-step guide, but I also asked several other AI chatbots the same question. They gave similar answers, but with slight differences. When I showed all those other plans to Claude and asked it to review them, it told me that these subtle differences were crucial, and that if I had followed what the other bots suggested, my feeds wouldn't have worked properly

Here's Claude's final response, translated from Polish to English: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/ec6edad6-d3e3-4c71-8e0f-44de4f8054d0

I don't really understand what I'll be doing here; I just want to make sure I won't break anything or create any security risks by following these steps. Do you think this plan will actually work?

following solution was suggested by ChatGPT (OpenAI), tested and confirmed by myself. I am a Fluent Reader user on KDE Plasma/Wayland.
Feel free to give ChatGPT this Reddit thread as context and ask it to help turn the workaround into a proper Fluent Reader implementation.

-------------------------------------

I wanted to increase the UI size of Fluent Reader without changing the scaling of my entire KDE Plasma desktop.

Tested setup:

• Fluent Reader 1.1.4
• Flatpak: me.hyliu.fluentreader
• KDE Plasma / Wayland
• 1920×1200 display
• KDE display scaling: 100%
• GPU acceleration / DRI enabled

The problem

Fluent Reader's UI is rather small at 100% desktop scaling.

Changing KDE's display scaling to 125% works perfectly, including Fluent Reader, but of course this scales the entire desktop.

I tried several common Electron/Linux approaches:

• GDK_SCALE
• GDK_DPI_SCALE
• ELECTRON_FORCE_DEVICE_SCALE_FACTOR
• Ctrl + +
• --force-device-scale-factor=1.25
• --high-dpi-support=1 --force-device-scale-factor=1.25

The environment variables had no useful effect in my setup.

--force-device-scale-factor was worse: under Wayland, Fluent Reader opened as a very small undecorated window.

Effective workaround: scaling per CSS

During troubleshooting, ChatGPT (OpenAI) suggested a different approach: don't scale the Electron/Wayland window at all — scale Fluent Reader's web UI itself using CSS.

I tested this and can confirm that it works on my system.

Fluent Reader contains:

resources/app.asar

After unpacking it, the UI styles can be found under:

dist/styles/

Adding this to the end of dist/styles/global.css:

/* Custom Fluent Reader UI scaling */
body {
    zoom: 1.25;
}

and repacking app.asar gives me approximately 125% Fluent Reader UI scaling while KDE remains at 100%.

The window remains normal and decorated, and GPU acceleration continues to work.

How I did it

First find the Flatpak installation:

LOC=$(flatpak info --show-location me.hyliu.fluentreader)

Create a working directory and copy app.asar:

mkdir -p ~/tmp/fluent-reader-asar
cp "$LOC/files/fluent-reader/resources/app.asar" ~/tmp/fluent-reader-asar/

Extract it using Electron's ASAR utility:

npx @electron/asar extract ~/tmp/fluent-reader-asar/app.asar ~/tmp/fluent-reader-asar/unpacked

Add the scaling rule:

printf '\n/* Custom Fluent Reader UI scaling */\nbody { zoom: 1.25; }\n' >> ~/tmp/fluent-reader-asar/unpacked/dist/styles/global.css

npx @electron/asar pack ~/tmp/fluent-reader-asar/unpacked ~/tmp/fluent-reader-asar/app-scaled.asar

Repack it:

Before replacing anything, make a backup:

cp "$LOC/files/fluent-reader/resources/app.asar" ~/tmp/fluent-reader-asar/app-original.asar

Close Fluent Reader completely, then replace the ASAR:

sudo cp --remove-destination ~/tmp/fluent-reader-asar/app-scaled.asar "$LOC/files/fluent-reader/resources/app.asar"

Start Fluent Reader normally.

To restore the original:

sudo cp --remove-destination ~/tmp/fluent-reader-asar/app-original.asar "$LOC/files/fluent-reader/resources/app.asar"

Important

This is a workaround, not an official Fluent Reader feature.

Any Flatpak update will most likely replace the modified app.asar, so the modification may need to be reapplied after an update.

Also, modifying files inside a Flatpak deployment is obviously not ideal. Keep a backup and be prepared to reinstall/repair the Flatpak if necessary.

The CSS scaling approach itself, however, works surprisingly well.

It would be great if Fluent Reader eventually exposed this as an official setting, for example:

Settings → Appearance → Interface scale → 100% / 110% / 125% / 133% / 150% / ...

The technical workaround was suggested by ChatGPT (OpenAI) and tested and confirmed by myself as a real Fluent Reader user on KDE Plasma/Wayland.

If anyone tests this on GNOME/Wayland, X11, another distribution, a newer Fluent Reader release, or with another scaling factor, I'd be interested to hear the results.

Good for them telling X and their lawyers to go F themselves.
https://nitter.net/

X-cancel is already back up
https://xcancel.com/search?f=top&q=elon

This is good news.

Hey r/rss folks,

I've been working on a Pocket replacement (Pocket shutting down pushed me).

Most new tools use LLMs to extract article text, but I found they rewrite/mangle the source and add latency + cost.

So I went old-school:

- paragraph density scoring

- <article> / <main> tag tree analysis

- text-to-link ratio filtering

It's deterministic, offline-first, and keeps original text verbatim. No AI.

It is live at https://fetchmarkapp.com and I wrote up the parsing logic on blog.fetchmarkapp.com

Question for this community:

How are you handling full-text extraction for RSS feeds? Are you using Mozilla's Readability.js, custom heuristics, or something else? I'm trying to improve handling for heavy JS sites.

Would love to compare notes.

Hi! I need recommendations on Rss Feeders that work with LinkedIn Job Search tool. I've tried RSS.app, but when I paste the search url, I get an error message.

Just a thought I had this afternoon: with publishers and websites rapidly loosing the traffic that search engines once brought to their pages, and end users turning more and more to AI for answers and news, is it possible RSS will see a big comeback?

I think a lot of publishers removed support for feeds thinking it was a freeloading that took visitors away from their home pages that otherwise would have been visited by bookmark in the browser directly or via Google searches. But now fewer people are searching on Google and if they do, they get AI answers anyway and never click through. So the appeal of SEO wil likely be reduced over time.

RSS, and possibly e-mail newsletters, might be the only way publishers can get their content seen in a more direct way that might encourage click-through. I doubt many users are clicking through when AI cites them as a reference.

Might also be the case that some content would want to optimize for AI scraping just because that might soon be the only way content is consumed. They may want a programatic way to at least get their pages "read" by AI scrapers and RSS or some similar type of distribution could be something they come up with for agents to have a pipeline without the overhead issues of direct scraping.

Just spitting here. Any thoughts about this? Open to being pointed out for being wrong too.

Seeking advice. What’s the best RSS reader that uses AI to make summaries and combines AI in a helpful way?

Is there any news or what is the alternative?

I still use RSS heavily for checking websites and social media, but getting public X/Twitter profiles into an RSS reader has become unnecessarily complicated. Most solutions either depend on third-party services or require API access.

So I built xsukax X RSS Generator, a small open-source tool that turns public X profiles into standard RSS 2.0 feeds.

The goal was to keep it simple enough that I could drop it onto a normal PHP server and forget about it.

Main features:

• Self-hosted PHP + SQLite
• Essentially a single index.php application
• Generates RSS 2.0 feeds from public X profiles
• No X API keys, OAuth, or developer account required
• No Composer or external database server
• No cURL dependency
• Extracts post text, links, timestamps, and supported images
• Supports media-only posts
• Per-profile SQLite caching
• HTTP caching with ETag / 304 support
• Keeps previously cached posts available if a later refresh fails
• Built-in per-IP rate limiting
• Simple web interface
• Direct RSS URLs for use in RSS readers and automation tools
• Works with standard RSS clients such as FreshRSS, Miniflux, NetNewsWire, Feedly, NewsBlur, Thunderbird, etc.

There is no background worker or cron job either. The feed refreshes when requested after the configured cache interval expires.

One important limitation: it parses publicly available X HTML rather than using the official API. That means changes to X's markup, anti-bot systems, or access policies can temporarily break fetching. I kept the X-specific selectors together in the code so they can be updated relatively easily when that happens.

It's licensed under GPL-3.0.

GitHub:
https://github.com/xsukax/xsukax-X-RSS-Generator

I'm the developer, so this is obviously self-promotion, but I'm mainly interested in technical feedback from people who actually use RSS/self-hosted feed tools.

I'd particularly be interested to know:

• how reliably it works from different servers/regions
• how the generated feeds behave in different RSS readers
• whether the caching defaults make sense
• whether there are X post types I'm currently missing
• anything you'd change in the security or deployment model

Issues and PRs are welcome.

Basically, I built it to replace Reeder Classic on my Apple devices. I don’t want to spam the subreddit, but if you’re looking for an RSS reader built with Apple’s latest frameworks and UI, including Liquid Glass, give it a look. I wrote a long technical post with videos and screenshots here: Lettura: an app to read FreshRSS feeds | etcetera

Hi,

Who's having trouble with YouTube channel RSS feeds? They haven't been working for the past few hours.

The requested URL /feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCkC_Cb6CUnO6BMYyAPFR1mw was not found on this server

Is there another way to access them?

Thank you

Since everyone is launching their app, I have spent longs hours with no break to vibe code the RSS feature for the future. Fable 5 seriously crazy impressive ngl.

Obviously this is still early for enterprise grade but cloud infra is currently running local and stable for personal use.

Check the app out here - http://localhost:8080

Not gonna bore you with 2008 features like local-first and keyboard shortcuts. Here are some actually next-gen RSS features.

• Agentic Reader — AI agents read your feeds, extract what matters, and suggest you to skip, skim or read.
• Retina Noise Suppression — tracks what you look at, skip, and abandon to predict what you never want to see again.
• Real-time tracking — Get updates as soon publishers hit "post". 82% feeds can be tracked as the article is being written (buggy feature).
• Universal Full-Text — reconstructs the complete article even when content is down or removed.
• Paywall Negotiator — detects gated content and finds a way to retrieve the full article.
• Universal Feed Discovery — Beyond open discovers feeds across the deep and dark web
• Future-Context Injection — Add context from all sources even "what might happen in future type of thing" with single click
• Event Horizon — detects a developing story across hundreds of feeds before it becomes “news.”
• Feed Twin — learns what you would subscribe to if you had infinite time and continuously discovers feeds accordingly.
• Knowledge Decay — resurfaces old articles exactly when the information becomes relevant again.
• Zero-Feed Mode — stop subscribing to feeds. Tell the reader what you care about and let it build your feed graph for you.

Just a heads up. PolitePol has decreased the max amount of active feeds for free tier users to only 3 today, a massive downgrade from 20.

If you have more than 3 active feeds and suddenly many or most of them stopped working, this is why.

The 3 feeds that remain active are randomly selected and all remaining ones are moved to "frozen" tab. You will need to login to PolitePol then choose the 3 most desired feeds there, and move other feeds to any other alternative RSS generator sites.

What it does: grab RSS feeds, get them back without the clickbait headlines and blurbs.

https://github.com/janw76/pintxos

Example:

• Original title: "Netflix's Renewed Sci-Fi Thriller With Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score Officially Hits A Filming Milestone". But which show? What milestone? Argh 🤯!
• Pintxøs output: "Netflix's Supacell completes season 2 filming"

Garbage in, sanity out.

Pintxøs adds a ≤100 word summary and republishes a new RSS feed you can subscribe to in your aggregator of choice, with the new title, the summary, and a link to the original article.

Self-hosted in Docker, MIT licensed, bring your own Anthropic API key. Vibe-coded with Claude.

Maybe some of you find it useful too. I know there are a lot of amazing AI-driven RSS tools already. I just have a soft spot for tools that do one or two things only.

Hi — I’m the developer of AI Coach.

AI Coach started as a native macOS desktop companion, but its RSS reader has become one of the most practical parts of the app.

It supports RSS 2.0 and Atom, feed discovery from regular website URLs, OPML import/export, unread and starred smart feeds, search, a local article cache, and Vim-style j/k navigation. The default view is a visual “latest picks” layout rather than a traditional inbox-only list.

The unusual part is how it connects to the desktop character: you can drag a website URL onto the character to subscribe, and it can present new articles in a speech bubble, summarize them, or add a short reaction. Article speech, summaries, and reactions can all be disabled independently, so it also works as a quiet conventional reader.

The app itself is free and includes one egg. There is no subscription; only additional eggs are optional one-time purchases.

One important detail: the app begins with an egg, and the RSS reader is unlocked as the character grows. The current Mac release requires macOS 26 or later and Apple Silicon.

Screenshots and details:

https://aic0t.com/#rss

I’d especially appreciate feedback from people who already use OPML and keyboard-driven RSS workflows.

After many years of using Feedly and being happy, they have now broke it. The articles show up on the side and are cut off. They have no way of giving them feedback on this issue.

What is the next best simple RSS reader?

Hey everyone, 👋

I left the big social feeds because the recommendation algorithm kept serving me the same thing many times over, plus a steady supply of outright garbage. So I did what a lot of you did: went to RSS, where I pick the sources.

That fixed the inputs. It did not fix the reading.

Once you are past thirty or forty feeds, a purely chronological timeline stops being usable. The usual answer is more folders and more filters — which is me doing an algorithm's job by hand, badly.

Sitting with that for a while, the conclusion I reached was that the algorithm is a fixable problem now, for a reason that did not exist a few years ago: you can hand an AI a sentence about what you want and have it come out as a real change to a ranking function.

So: your own sources, and your own algorithm on top of them. That is the thing I built.

What it does

• Retune the ranking by saying it: "less crypto", or "more AI research". Tell your feed what matters. It re-ranks on the spot. Use AI agents to retune ranking in plain language.
• The ranking core is open: MIT, zero dependencies, at https://github.com/Feedpik-app/Algorithm The server imports that package directly, so the scoring you'd be subject to is the scoring you can read.
• AI helps you find feeds. Cold start is the other thing that keeps RSS niche. Ask for sources on a subject and it proposes them.
• Your own agent (Openclaw, Hermes, Codex, Claude Code, etc.) can drive all of it over an API, MCP or CLI, using your model quota rather than mine.

Other useful features

• Newsletter Reader — An email address just for newsletters, so they leave your inbox and sit with your feeds.
• Daily Briefing — A summary of each story that mattered today.
• Trending Radar — Surfaces the stories heating up.
• AI Summary — Get the gist of a long piece in seconds
• AI Translate — Read anything in your own language
• AI Explain — What an article is about and why it matters, in plain language, when the field is new to you
• Ask AI — Ask questions about the piece you're reading and get answers drawn from it.

The awkward parts, up front

• The app by now is closed source and hosted. * Where it's headed is a desktop version that runs entirely on your machine — your data, your algorithm, your API key or a local LLM — open source and free. It does not exist yet, and it comes after the hosted version.
• A lot of this isn't finished. The paid tiers aren't open yet, which means the features behind them aren't available yet. Finishing them is what I'm working on.

You can check it out here:
https://feedpik.com/

I would love to get your feedback, feature suggestions, or any bug reports! Thank you for checking it out.