Public profiles and RSS sharing

One of the things I like most about RSS is that it's a protocol, not a platform. There's no walled garden, just a URL you can subscribe to from anywhere. With that in mind, the latest update adds public profiles to Spoonfed, and the whole thing is built around RSS from the ground up.

How it works

By default, your profile is private. Nothing you read or save is visible to anyone else. If you want to share, you opt in from Settings and pick a display name.

Once you've done that, you get a public page at /u/your-name. You choose what shows up there, bookmarks only, quotes only, or both. Each item you want to share gets individually marked for publication, so your public profile only shows what you explicitly put there.

The profile page is clean and minimal. No follower counts, no engagement metrics, just a list of what you've been reading, in chronological order.

The RSS part

The reason I built this the way I did is that I wanted people to be able to follow each other's reading without needing an account. If someone finds your profile interesting, they can subscribe to your RSS feed in any reader and get updates alongside their regular subscriptions.

That felt like the right model for Spoonfed. Reading is personal, sharing is optional, and when you do share, you do it in an open format that doesn't require the other person to join anything.

What's not there

There are no likes, no comments, no notifications when someone views your page. I kept those out intentionally. Adding social interactions would change the dynamic, you'd start curating for an audience rather than reading for yourself. The public profile is a one-way window, not a social feed.