How it works
Every feature: what it does and where it is. Nothing else.
The first three things
- Pick a few genres. Ticking them on the first screen subscribes you to a set of feeds at once.
- Click a row to read it. What you open is marked read and leaves the unread list.
- When it piles up, use Mark all read. You are not meant to keep up.
Getting started
- Subscribe by genrefirst screen
- Subscribes to the feeds in the genres you pick, all at once. You can drop individual ones afterwards.
- Add by URL+ Add site
- A site URL is enough — the feed itself is located for you. YouTube channel and Mastodon account URLs work as they are.
- Follow a site with no feed+ Add site
- Give the URL of a page that lists posts and we will pick the headlines off it, hourly, for up to 20 such pages. Headlines and links only, and pages disallowed by robots.txt cannot be followed.
- BookmarkletSettings > Feeds
- A button on your bookmarks bar subscribes to the site you are looking at. On a phone, add this site to your home screen and the browser’s Share menu does the same thing.
- Import OPMLSettings > Feeds
- Reads the file another reader exported, folders included. Duplicates and dead feeds can be dropped before the import runs.
- Browse sitestop menu
- Browse the sites indexed here by subject and language. Recent articles and how often a site posts are visible before you subscribe.
Reading
- Unread / All / ▲Focus / Starredabove the list
- Switches what the list shows. “▲Focus” shows only what the learning filter promoted.
- List styleSettings > Appearance
- List (title and excerpt), titles only, compact, or cards with thumbnails. You are asked to pick one the first time you sign in. Row height and font size are separate settings.
- Show thumbnailsSettings > Appearance
- Whether card view loads article images. Images are fetched through freefeed, so the source site is never told that you received the article. Turn it off and cards show the excerpt instead.
- Keyboard? key
- Opens the key list. The layout can be the default (Inoreader-compatible), FreshRSS-compatible or Vim.
- Mark all readabove the list
- Per feed, per folder, or everything. Undo is available right afterwards.
- Mark read on scrollSettings > Appearance
- Marks rows read as they scroll past the top. There is no per-row undo, so it is off by default.
- Duplicate bundling
- The same article arriving from several feeds is shown once. Bundling happens at display time only; nothing is deleted.
- Edited-article detectionin the article
- Articles rewritten after publication are marked, and the text as it was before the edit can be shown.
- Audio playbackin the article
- Plays podcast enclosures in place. Speed is adjustable, and playback resumes where you left off.
Organising
- Foldersleft list
- Move feeds from the row’s action menu. A feed’s display name can be changed there too. Folders can hold one level of subfolders, and selecting a parent folder shows its subfolders’ articles too.
- Folder suggestionsleft list
- Offers to group feeds only when several of a kind pile up uncategorised. Dismissing it makes it go away.
- Tagsin the article
- Tag an article and it becomes readable by tag from the left list. Rules can apply tags automatically.
- Auto-tags⋯ on a feed in the left list
- On a busy feed, tag only the articles containing the words you care about. A small label appears before the title in the list, and clicking it filters to those articles. Keywords in Latin letters match whole words (so “AI” does not match “Training”). Auto-tags are rules, so you can edit them later in Settings > Rules.
- RulesSettings > Rules
- Matching articles are hidden, marked read, starred or tagged. Conditions run over title, summary, author, URL and feed with contains / does not contain / equals / starts with / ends with / regex, combined with AND or OR. A rule can be limited to specific feeds.
- Muteleft list
- Keeps the subscription but takes the feed out of the list — for feeds you stopped reading but do not want to drop.
Finding things
- Search/ key
- Searches titles, summaries and article text. Operators: intitle: author: feed: before: after: is:unread is:starred.
- Saved searchessearch dialog
- Name a search after running it and it sits in the left list. No retyping the query each time.
- Keyword monitorssearch dialog
- Collect matches hourly from every feed indexed here, including ones you do not subscribe to. Can send a notification.
- Browse sitesbelow the sidebar list
- Suggestions based on what you already read, added one at a time. Feeds gaining subscribers lately are listed too.
- Read-together suggestionswhen a feed is open
- Shows what people who read this feed also read.
Keeping things
- Starsleft edge of a row
- Press ☆ to star. The “Starred” filter above the list collects them.
- Highlightsin the article
- Select text, then pick a colour. If the article is rewritten and a highlight no longer lines up, it says so.
- Notesin the article
- One per article — somewhere to write down why you kept it.
- Saved linksin the article
- Saves the article URL to the left list. It is separate from read state and stars, so it stays after you finish reading.
- Share targetsSettings > Appearance
- Only the services you tick appear under “Share”. It opens a new tab; no account is connected.
Turning the volume down
- Learning filter▲ / ▼ in the list
- Remembers the feed and the author of the article you pressed it on. Title words are not picked up automatically (only words common to everything would accumulate); add those under Settings > Rules.
- What happens to demoted articlesSettings > Appearance
- Either dimmed in place or removed from the list. Dimmed is the default.
- Subscription reviewSettings > Feeds
- Lists subscriptions that stopped updating, keep erroring, were never opened, or have gone unread for a while. Mute, move or unsubscribe in bulk.
- Quiet feed rescueabove the list
- When unread items from rarely-updated feeds get buried under busy ones, a link appears to view just those.
Notifications
- Web PushSettings > Appearance
- Fires only on new keyword-monitor matches. New articles from your subscriptions are never notified (it would never stop). Off by default.
- No article text in notifications
- The app fetches the details after the notification arrives, so no article content reaches the push service (FCM and the like).
When a feed stops
- Feed statusleft list
- Fetch errors, stopped feeds and slowing feeds are shown by the feed name, along with the last successful fetch.
- Find an alternative URLleft list
- Looks for a replacement feed on the same site after a move. It is only offered once the failure has persisted for a few days, to tell it apart from a temporary outage. Switching resubscribes, so read positions do not carry over.
- Fetch interval
- Feeds that publish more often are fetched more often. The interval is worked out here; there is no setting for it.
Your data, and leaving
- Export OPMLSettings > Feeds
- The format other readers can import. Contains the subscription list and folder structure.
- Export everything (JSON)Settings > Privacy
- Subscriptions, read state, stars, tags and categories. Available at any time.
- Personalised adsSettings > Privacy
- Can be turned off. If your browser sends a GPC signal they are disabled automatically, whatever this setting says.
- Delete accountSettings > Privacy
- Removes subscriptions, read state, stars, tags, settings and sign-in links, and revokes the session immediately. It cannot be undone.
Limits
There is only a free plan, so these apply to everyone.
| Feeds | 1,000 |
|---|---|
| Rules | 50 (10 conditions each) |
| Tags | 200 |
| Keyword monitors | 20 |
| Saved searches | 30 |
| Saved links | 500 |
| Highlights | 50 per article |
| Devices receiving notifications | 10 |
If something is missing here
Anything you cannot work out is something this page failed to explain.
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