Restoring a 1972 road bike, one Saturday at a time
When a rusty frame turned up at the flea market, I didn’t expect it to become the project of the year.
Built for people who read a lot
Five feeds or five hundred, a dozen posts a day or thousands: Downread keeps reading fast and effortless. Here is everything it does, with demos you can click.
318 left
Apple announces the next generation of its silicon lineup
The new chips promise another major leap in performance per watt.
A new compression format claims 30% smaller images
The reference encoder is slow, but the numbers on photographic content are hard to argue with.
The quiet return of the personal website
Writers are leaving the platforms and moving back to a domain of their own.
A second look at the comet everyone missed
Amateur astronomers caught it three days before the observatories did.
Show HP: A terminal emulator in 400 lines of C
I wanted to understand how terminals work, so I wrote one.
Why your bread needs a longer cold rise
Twelve hours in the fridge does more for flavor than any fancy flour.
The kernel drops support for a 30-year-old file system
Nobody has filed a bug against it since 2011, which settled the debate.
Hover to pause. Watch the blue dots turn grey.
Reading
Endless scrolling
No pages, no “load more” button. Just keep scrolling, or press j, and the next posts are already there. Posts you scroll past are marked read automatically, so next time the stream starts right where you left off.
- One stream across all feeds, a folder, or a single feed
- Prefer headlines? Switch to a two-column list layout
- Keep a post unread with one click, even after scrolling past
Search topics, sites, or paste a URL
Browse by topic
BlogsNews sitesMagazinesYouTube channelsNewsletters
Click on anything for an explanation
Discover
A large feed catalog
Tens of thousands of sites, searchable and sorted by topic. Every entry comes with a description, how often it posts and when it last did. Preview the latest posts, then follow with one click.
- Hand-picked recommendations on the Discover page, refreshed daily
- Paste any site’s URL and Downread finds its feed
- YouTube channels work like any other feed
Marked 0 posts as read
Try Mark all read, or the menu next to it
Read tracking
Thousands of posts? No problem.
Downread keeps track of every post you read, across all your devices, and stays fast with hundreds of feeds and tens of thousands of posts. Decide per feed how you want to read it:
- Tracked feeds count every unread post, so you miss nothing
- Untracked feeds just show a dot: browse them when you’re in the mood
- Mark read what is older than a day, a week or a month, and keep the newest few
- Cap how many unread posts a busy feed may collect, by number or age
Organize
Hundreds of feeds, neatly organized
The My Feeds page is built for big subscription lists: folders, search, and mass operations on as many feeds as you select. Go ahead, try it.
Tech
AppleRumors 8
TacoCrunchy 7
Technical Arches 9
DotSlash 3
Science
Orbit Daily 12
Lab Notes 0
Weekend
Field Notes Weekly 1
The Slow Cook 4
Hacker Post 0
Miracle Revolution 0
The Weekly Byte 2
Select feeds, move them, search, collapse folders, switch tracking. It all works.
We cut our image sizes by 30%
The new encoder is slow, but the savings are real. Try it yourself with encode --q 80 on your own photos.
Update: the encoder now ships as a public beta.
| Format | Size | Encode |
|---|---|---|
| JPEG | 412 KB | 0.2 s |
| WebP | 298 KB | 0.4 s |
| New format | 281 KB | 3.1 s |
Switch between a typical reader and Downread
Posts
Posts look the way the author made them
Many readers keep only the bare structure of a post: the site’s styling is gone, highlighted boxes turn into plain quotes, and embedded videos vanish. Downread keeps the formatting that carries meaning and drops only the clutter.
- Tables, code, quotes, footnotes and the site’s own styles
- Embeds from YouTube, Vimeo, X, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, Reddit, Bluesky and more
- Prefer privacy? Embeds can wait behind a placeholder until you click
Unread posts
Home
Unread posts 42
Read later
Starred
FEEDS
AppleRumors 8
TacoCrunchy 7
Technical Arches 9
Restoring a 1972 road bike, one Saturday at a time
When a rusty frame turned up at the flea market, I didn’t expect it to become the project of the year.
Original Keep Star
Click the demo, then use the arrow keys, Enter, j and k
Keyboard
Hands stay on the keyboard
Everything in Downread can be reached without a mouse. The arrow keys move the focus from the sidebar to the posts to every button and form field, Enter activates, and shortcuts cover the rest.
- j k
- Next / previous post
- s
- Star
- m
- Keep unread
- r
- Read later
- Alt a
- Mark all read
- Alt s
- Skip feed
- Alt n
- Next feed
- ?
- Show all shortcuts
Sources
Every source, every format
If it publishes a feed, or sends an email, Downread can read it.
The Weekly Byte
Newsletters as feeds
Get a private email address for each newsletter inbox. Subscribe with it, and every issue arrives as a post, with all its formatting. Your real inbox stays clean.
RSS 2.0RSS 0.91 / 0.92RSS 0.90 RSS 1.0 / RDF
AtomJSON Feed
All the feed formats
RSS in every version back to Netscape’s 0.90, RDF, Atom and JSON Feed. Downread copes with the quirks of real-world feeds, so old and odd ones work too.
Real-time with WebSub
When a site supports WebSub, it notifies Downread the moment it publishes. New posts show up within seconds instead of waiting for the next scheduled check.
Declare RSS Bankruptcy?
We see you have 4,812 tracked unread posts. That’s a lot! Most people won’t be able to catch up. Here are some options to get you back on your feet:
Click on anything for an explanation
Fresh start
Back from vacation? Declare RSS Bankruptcy.
A few days away and thousands of unread posts are waiting. Instead of guilt, Downread offers a way out: when your backlog gets out of hand, it suggests one-click clean-ups tailored to your feeds.
- Turn the busiest feeds into untracked ones
- Keep only the newest few posts per feed
- Or start over completely. It’s your call, and it can be turned off.
subscriptions.opmlexported from your old reader
- Tech38 feeds
- News24 feeds
- Science19 feeds
- Cooking12 feeds
- No folder21 feeds
Import complete: 114 feeds in 5 folders
Click the card to replay
Portability
Bring your feeds. Take them along.
Moving from Feedly, Inoreader or any other reader takes a minute: export an OPML file there, import it here, and your feeds arrive with their folders.
And it works the other way, too. One click exports all your subscriptions as OPML. Your feeds are yours, not ours.
Appearance
Unread posts 42
Read later 3
Starred
FEEDS
AppleRumors 8
TacoCrunchy 7
Technical Arches 9
Restoring a 1972 road bike, one Saturday at a time
When a rusty frame turned up at the flea market, I didn’t expect it to become the most rewarding project of the year.
OriginalKeepStarApple announces the next generation of its silicon lineup
The new chips promise another major leap in performance per watt.
Switch themes. Automatic follows your system setting.
Comfort
Dark mode for late readers
A carefully tuned dark theme, easy on the eyes at night. Choose light, dark, or let Downread follow your system setting, so it turns dark whenever your device does.
See for yourself.
Start reading in seconds. No account, no credit card, no setup.
Start nowImporting OPML, newsletter inboxes and adding new sites require a free sign up.