My RSS Reader is Done

I posted a few months ago about vibe-coding an RSS reader. The mood on the internet seems to be that these apps are buggy and never get finished, so I figured it was worth posting an update. Another thousand commits later, Lion Reader supports every feature I care about, works reliably, has very good performance, and is open for public signups¹.

I've actually been using it for a while, and mostly kept signups closed because of some expensive features like AI summaries (now handled by making users provide their own API keys).

The features are entirely designed around what me and a friend find useful, but I think I have decent taste so consider Lion Reader if they're useful to you as well:

• Subscribe to RSS/ATOM/JSON/email newsletter feeds
• Save articles for later, including special logic for Google Docs, LessWrong, and ArXiv
• On-demand AI summaries (requires an Anthropic API key)
• An MCP server
• Read feeds, i.e. "Summarize my most recently 10 articles in tag X"
• Upload reports as saved articles²
• Google Reader / Fresh RSS API for native clients (doesn't support summaries)
• Narration³ with highlighting, similar to how Kindle narration works
• Algorithmic feed based on your votes (can be disabled)
• Firefox and Chrome⁴ browser extensions for saving articles
• All of the things you'd expect like dark/light themes, tags, etc.
• It's open source of course

I thought it would be funny to use a demo of the app to describe the features, so if you're curious, all of the features are listed in "articles" here.

I think at this point, every feature I care about is implemented on the web app, although I want to improve how the local caching works and incidentally add offline mode based on that. At some point I might make a native app for Android again, but I don't really have time to validate one.

I'm open to feature requests and pull requests (as long as they include screenshots to demonstrate that the feature works).