Reading full articles, even when the feed only gives you a summary

Some feeds only publish a sentence or two, just enough to make you click through to the website. That's fine if you want to visit the site, but it defeats the purpose of a reader that's trying to keep you in a single focused view.

Full-text fetch solves this. When enabled for a feed, Spoonfed fetches the original article page and extracts the main content from it, rather than using whatever the feed provides. You read the full article in the reader without leaving.

How it works

Under the hood it uses go-readability, the same extraction logic that powers Mozilla's reader mode, to pull the main text out of the page and strip away the navigation, ads, and surrounding noise. The result is stored and displayed the same way as any other article.

It's not perfect. Complex page layouts occasionally confuse the extractor, and paywalled content can't be fetched regardless. But for the majority of feeds that truncate their content, it works well.

Per-feed control

Full-text fetch is enabled globally by default, but you can turn it off for individual feeds that already provide complete content, there's no point fetching the page again if the feed already gives you everything. The toggle lives in each feed's settings panel.

For feeds with rich, complete RSS content, you'll probably never need it. For the ones that give you three sentences and a "read more" link, it makes a noticeable difference.