A calm, self-chosen feed

A feed you chose, that ends.

Feed Good is a reader built on the one part of social media that worked: the things you followed, newest first, and then nothing. Here is the idea behind it, and how to build yours.

The idea

Social media's original promise was simple, and it has been quietly withdrawn: a reverse-chronological feed of things you chose to follow. What replaced it ranks, injects, and measures — not because anyone set out to make it worse, but because a feed that ends is a feed you close, and a closed feed sells nothing.

The old primitive survived underneath, though. Nearly everything still publishes RSS: a YouTube channel does, so does a subreddit, a Mastodon account, a podcast, and most newspapers. Feed Good subscribes to those on your behalf and renders them as a media feed — rich cards, inline video and images, one column you can read with a thumb — rather than as the three-pane email client every RSS reader has been since 2004.

It is meant to feel like the thing you are leaving. It simply does none of the things you are leaving it for.

What is missing, on purpose

No ranking
Newest first, always. Nothing is promoted, buried, or suggested. If you did not follow it, it is not here.
No endless scroll
A session is the unread set, and then it stops. Older posts sit behind a deliberate click, never a scroll.
No autoplay
Video waits for a tap, and ends without a wall of recommendations for something else.
No reactions
The complete list of things you can do to a post: read it, save it, open the original. Nothing to perform.
No counts
Unread badges were the original hook. They stay hidden unless whoever runs this instance turns them on.
No third-party requests
Every image is fetched by this server and re-served from it. The publisher never sees your address.

Every line above is a built feature, not an intention. They are the product.

Building your good feed

A reader is only ever as calm as the list behind it. Six habits, in the order they matter:

  1. 01

    Start with five things you would actually miss

    Not fifty. Every reader dies the same death: a subscription list built like a bookmark folder, full of everything you might one day want, until opening it costs an hour. Five sources whose absence you would notice is a feed you finish — and finishing is the entire point.

  2. 02

    Paste whatever you already have

    A channel URL, r/france, a @user@instance handle, or just lemonde.fr — the feed is discovered for you. Before you commit, you see three real, recent posts from it, so you are never subscribing to an opaque XML file on faith.

  3. 03

    Do not fear the back catalogue

    Following a podcast with ten years of episodes pulls all of them, but only the newest ten arrive unread; the rest go straight to the archive. Adding a source costs you one screen, not an afternoon.

  4. 04

    Read to the end, then stop

    The hairline down the left of the column fills as you scroll — that is how much of the session is left, which is the one number an algorithmic feed will never show you. When you reach the bear, you are done. The archive exists, but you have to ask for it.

  5. 05

    Come back in a week and prune

    The question is not whether a source is good. It is whether you read it. Anything you have scrolled past twice is noise wearing a subscription — unfollow it from Sources. Nothing is lost, and the feed gets shorter, which is the direction that matters.

  6. 06

    Watch for the one source that becomes the feed

    A busy subreddit or a newswire will out-post ten blogs without trying, and quietly turn your column into its channel. If one name is on half the cards, that is a decision being made for you again. Drop it, or keep it knowing what it is.

While you are reading

Keyboard
j / k move · o opens · s saves · m toggles read · Esc deselects.
Saved
Saving puts an item on its own page, out of the session. Nothing expires from it.
Paywalls and truncated feeds
Articles that arrive as a teaser open in a reader overlay with the text extracted — no layout shift, no consent banner, no ads.
Collections
Import an OPML file and its folders become collections: chips above the feed that narrow it to one group.
Paper
Four of them, in the header. Lamplight and Daylight are the same room with the curtains shut and open; Edition sets the feed as a printed daily; Atelier pins it to a studio wall. The choice is remembered.
The way out
Sources exports everything you follow as OPML, which every other reader on earth imports. That door stays open, which is the only reason the front one is worth walking through.

That is the whole thing.

No feed of ours goes on longer than it has to.

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