Adding sources

Every source starts at + Add source in the sidebar. Pick a kind and the wizard walks you through the rest.

Subscribe by URL

Choose RSS / Atom feed and paste either a feed address or a site’s home page. From a home page, the server finds the site’s feeds: <link rel="alternate"> tags first, then common paths such as /feed and /feed.json. If it finds more than one, you pick.

reader reads these formats:

Format	Notes
RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), Atom	Categories, enclosures, Media RSS thumbnails, and YouTube’s media:group descriptions are all read
JSON Feed 1.0 and 1.1	Posts without a title take the first line of their text, cut at a word boundary
IndieWeb h-feed	An HTML page whose posts are marked up as h-entry. Discovery lists it after any RSS, Atom or JSON feed the site also offers, because those usually carry the full post
Podcast feeds	Episodes get a player, chapters and transcripts. See Podcasts

Private feeds

Some feeds need a sign-in: a paid newsletter, a members-only podcast, an internal wiki. Under Sign-in in the same step, choose one of:

• Username and password. HTTP Basic authentication.
• Access token. Sent as Authorization: Bearer ….
• OAuth 2.0 sign-in. Enter the provider’s authorize URL, token URL and client id (and a client secret if the provider issued one), then press Sign in. The provider’s page opens in a pop-up. reader always uses PKCE and refreshes the token on its own when it expires.

With a sign-in, paste the feed’s own address. reader skips discovery and refuses to send the sign-in to any other host, including when a feed redirects somewhere else. If the first fetch fails, a username/password or token sign-in is deleted again, so a typo leaves nothing behind.

Sign-ins and connected accounts are listed under Accounts in the sidebar. An account that sources still use cannot be removed until you remove those sources.

Import from another reader (OPML)

+ Add source → OPML import takes the OPML file other readers export (Feedly, Inoreader, FreshRSS and most others) and subscribes to every feed in it at once. Feeds you already follow are skipped. One import adds at most 500 feeds. The first fetches run in the background, so a large import fills in over the next few minutes.

Import your YouTube subscriptions

YouTube has no feed for your subscriptions as a whole. It does publish a feed for each channel, so reader follows those:

1. Go to takeout.google.com, deselect all, and select YouTube and YouTube Music.
2. Under All YouTube data included, keep only subscriptions, then export.
3. Unzip the download and pick YouTube and YouTube Music/subscriptions/subscriptions.csv under + Add source → YouTube subscriptions.

Each channel becomes a subscription to https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=…. Takeout translates the file’s header row into your account language; reader recognizes it either way. A file with a row that is not a channel id is rejected as a whole, so picking the wrong CSV cannot import half of it. Channel feeds carry about the last 15 videos each, with thumbnails and descriptions.

History

Most feeds carry only their newest items. When a feed links to older pages (RFC 5005 rel="next" or rel="prev-archive", or JSON Feed’s next_url), a new subscription walks back up to ten pages after it appears in the sidebar. Those older items arrive already marked read so they don’t bury what’s new.

How often feeds refresh

Each feed has its own interval between 15 minutes and a day. It halves when a fetch finds new items and doubles when it doesn’t. reader also follows what the publisher asks for:

• It never polls faster than the feed’s <ttl>, its syndication-module updatePeriod/updateFrequency, or the response’s Cache-Control: max-age.
• A 429 or 503 with Retry-After pauses scheduled polls until then (at most a day). ↻ Refresh on the feed still fetches right away.
• Fetches send If-None-Match / If-Modified-Since, so an unchanged feed costs one 304.
• A failing feed backs off exponentially and shows ⚠ after ten failures in a row. It keeps being retried and recovers on its own.

Podcasts announced on Podping, and social sources with real-time delivery, update sooner than their interval. See Podcasts and Ingestors.