Skyreader update - UI refresh, opt-in public subscription & what's next

Now that things are a bit more under control lots of work has gone into Skyreader . A couple of improvements to highlight in this post: better UI and opt-in public subscriptions.

UI Improvements

The UI has been cleaned up and should now feel much better. You can now choose between list and expanded view to see either a list of titles or expanded summaries of each article.

Mobile in particular feels a lot better. The UI adapts to smaller screens better and navigating between feeds/views is less awkward.

The UI design is still evolving so let me know how it's working for you.

Opt-in public subscription list

When Skyreader was first launched, three things were stored publicly in your PDS:

article shares

list of subscribed feeds

read position (list of read articles)

As I mentioned in the last update having your reading list public is surprising coming from other RSS readers so I switched it to private by default. Communicating privacy is notoriously tricky since people don't read privacy dialogs!

While private subscriptions is the right default to not surprise people, I think it does make sense to provide an opt-in control for folks that are willing to make them public.

Skyreader now has a button in settings that will enable subscriptions sync to your PDS:

At the moment this checkbox includes your subscriptions list, not your read/unread article state. I had a lexicon for that but have since realized it needs to be thought through more carefully so that will come later.

One reason you might want to consider opting-in to public subscriptions is that other folks are already working on RSS+atproto readers! If you enable public subscriptions now, you'll be able to switch to these other readers when they launch and immediately see all your feeds—no import/export needed (and once we have private storage for repos we can do that with fewer privacy tradeoffs).

What comes next for Skyreader

I'll continue to refine the UI and polish issues as they come up. After that I plan to look at two main features: atproto integrations and "reader mode".

We're seeing an explosion of atproto apps that all produce feeds you might want to follow in a single place—every standard.site app is an obvious example of this—so Skyreader should make it easy for you to discover and subscribe to them along with all your other RSS feeds. There are some interesting design questions around how to best surface these kinds of feeds so expect to see some experiments soon.

For "reader mode" I'm thinking about how to best manage reading long-form content. Ironically enough, I think that most RSS readers have fairly basic features when it comes to actually reading articles; their primary design goal is to show you a bunch of new articles and assume you will delegate to some other system to keep track of your reading list (a bunch of open tabs is most people's default!).

What I've always wanted out of my RSS reader is for it to solve both the aggregation problem (consolidating all the feeds in one place) and the reading problem (keeping track of what I'm current reading and providing a great reading experience). This would include features like article progress tracking and more flexible reading workflows than just "starred". Expect to see some experiments in this direction soon!

As always, if you're running into problems or have ideas on what could be improved please leave feedback !