FeedCity

I made a new thing: a feed reader called FeedCity, available at https://feed.city. The main reason for adding yet another feed reader to the already huge pile, is that I couldn’t find an existing one with the features I’d like to have. Here’s how FeedCity is different, I believe:

• No unread count.
• Making feeds visible.
• Feed exploration and management.
• Lists: Following sites without a subscription.
• Sharing & discovery: create public lists to share with others.
• Openness.

Let’s briefly go through those in more detail.

No unread count

I believe unread counts create unnecessary stress. So FeedCity doesn’t have them. You don’t have to read everything.

Making feeds visible

I believe feeds don’t have the visibility they deserve. They are mostly hidden files behind their websites. In FeedCity, feeds have a public page. You can browse it. You can link to it. Examples:

• The feed for this site.
• kottke.org
• Daring Fireball

Feed exploration and management

I regularly find myself wanting to catch up on a single feed. On FeedCity you get to a feed’s site directly from each of its posts. And to subscribe or unsubscribe, you simply tap a button.

There’s also a “Favourites” timeline for feeds you mark as such, and a “Bookmarks” page where you can browse posts you bookmarked to read or reference later.

For each timeline, you also get an overview of all its feeds, as well as the ability to filter by “Video” or “Audio” content.

List: Follow sites without a subscription

You can also group feeds into lists. You don’t have to be subscribed to a feed to be able to add it to a list (you can, though). This is useful for feeds from sites that you want to browse occasionally, but don’t want its updates to be in your main timeline.

Sharing & discovery: create public lists to share with others.

On FeedCity, you can make any of your lists public. Other FeedCity citizens can then follow your lists. And those lists are also available to everyone else. Here are two examples of public lists:

• Beyond Tellerrand Düsseldorf 2025 speakers.
• IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2025 participants.

Openness

All those public lists offer outbound RSS and Atom feeds, too. So not only can those be publicly viewed in a browser, they can also be subscribed to in any other feed reader.

Every FeedCity citizen also gets “secret” feeds for all their timelines. I, for example, use the secret feed for all my bookmarked audio/podcast posts, and subscribe to this in my podcast client.

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So these are the main reasons for creating my own feed reader.

This is my first for-pay website. It’s still a bit basic and rough around the edges, but I set myself a deadline for this week. And I simply needed to finally get it out there.

If you’re interested, I’d be thrilled, if you gave it a try: https://feed.city.

And if you want, let me know what you think.