Why Spoonfed exists
You subscribe to feeds with the best of intentions. Then the unread count starts climbing. You open the app and face a wall of articles, and none of them feels like the obvious place to start. You pick one, but the rest are still there, waiting for you when you're done. Eventually you give up, mark everything as read, and move on. Reading shouldn't feel like that.
The inbox is the problem
Most feed readers work like email. You get an inbox, a list of unread items, and maybe a few folders or tags. Every time you open the app, a number tells you how far behind you are.
That setup works fine when you follow three blogs. But nobody follows three blogs. You follow thirty, fifty, or a hundred because subscribing is easy and free. Then the inbox turns into a to-do list you never asked for, and the unread count starts to feel like a score you're always losing.
So you stop opening the app. Not because the content is bad. You actually want to read those feeds. You stop because the interface makes you feel behind before you've even started.
What if there was no list?
Spoonfed doesn't show you a list of articles. It shows you one. The app picks an article from your subscriptions, you read it or skip it, and then you press Next. That's the whole interaction.
That's where the name comes from. The app spoonfeeds you articles one at a time, at your own pace.
There's no unread count because there's no inbox to clear. You open the app, read for as long as you feel like it, and close it. Whatever you don't get to will still be there next time, shuffled into the mix. If you turn on auto-discard, older articles quietly drop out.
Why random?
Showing articles in chronological order sounds reasonable until you see what it does. High-volume feeds take over, while the quiet blog you love gets buried under yesterday's news. You spend your first ten minutes on the newest and most urgent-looking stuff, which is rarely the most interesting.
Random order fixes that. A weekly essay has the same chance of appearing as this morning's hot take. You end up reading things you might never scroll down to, and you never quite know what you'll get next.
It also means you make fewer decisions. In a traditional reader, every session starts with scanning and evaluating: which article is worth your time? That small cost adds up across dozens of items. Spoonfed removes it. You don't pick. You just read.
Auto-discard keeps the pool clean. For a noisy feed that publishes ten things a day, set articles to expire after a week. The ones you miss quietly disappear, so the feed stays fresh. For a small blog that posts twice a month, turn it off and let every article wait for you.
The opposite of doomscrolling
Social media feeds are designed to never end. The algorithm always has one more thing to show you, tuned to whatever keeps you tapping. The result feels urgent, scattered, and vaguely unsatisfying.
Spoonfed works the other way. Your queue is finite and only contains articles from feeds you chose. There's no recommendation engine, trending section, or "you might also like." When you've read everything, the app shows you a quiet empty state. That's it. You're done.
The goal isn't to keep you in the app. It's to take the stress out of choosing what to read next, so you can read the things you care about and get on with your day.
Reading should be boring infrastructure
The best reading tool is one you don't think about. You open it, read something, and close it. It doesn't gamify your attention, send you notifications, or try to become a social network. It's just a simple connection between writers and readers.
Want to share what you're reading? You can. Turn on a public profile with your bookmarks and quotes, then let friends follow it through RSS. That's where it ends: no likes, comments, follower counts, or notifications. It's just a simple way to let people see what you've been reading.
That's what Spoonfed is trying to be: quiet and reliable. Subscribe to the stuff you care about, let the app handle the rest, and actually read the feeds you've been meaning to get to.
Free, and built by one person
Spoonfed is an indie project, built and maintained by one developer who's been trying to find a better way to read RSS for years.
It's free to use and there are no paid plans. If the running costs ever get too high for me to cover, I might add a paid tier to keep the lights on and the project moving.