I'm building a 100% keyboard-driven RSS reader

by mynameyeff • 2 years ago

2 10 2 years ago

mynameyeff6• 2 years ago

Hi there. I'm building a 100% keyboard-driven RSS reader.

With CoreText, you can do everything you'd typically expect from a RSS reader—but with a keyboard! Not just mundane stuff like scrolling <divs/> either. For example, you can:

• Add/delete RSS feeds

• Create/rename folders

• Sort/filter feeds

• Navigate to a RSS feed

• Read its articles

• Extract all of the images from the article, and view them in a fullscreen gallery

• Toggle between dark-light modes

• Etcetera.

We're a totally bootstrapped company with no investors (on a shoestring budget) so it's behind an email waitlist. This allows us to gauge how much our server costs increase as new users get onboarded to CoreText. That being said... I'm hoping to onboard users as quickly as possible! Feel to reach out at helpdesk@[domain] if you have questions & feedback.

Thank you for your time!

pvg2• 2 years ago

Waitlists don't make good HN submissions but when you're ready for people to try your thing, you can post a Show HN as outlined here https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

mynameyeff6• 2 years ago

Ah ok. Should I remove this post?

markx2• 2 years ago

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ is currently doing some great digging into RSS readers, so her posts may be useful to peruse.

mynameyeff6• 2 years ago

Thx! Yea I actually reached out to her last week, and I'm planning on installing her reporting tag after our launch day.

mynameyeff6• 2 years ago

More peripheral aspects of the product & business.

Our motivation: Using a mouse is the de facto device for the web, but it requires fine motor skills that feels incongruent for RSS readers. Why? RSS is primarily text-driven media, and the human-computer interface should be text-driven too. There's something about using a keyboard that feels more efficient and, consequently, more pleasurable!

Our biz model: After the beta, we'll be releasing a Long-Term Support (LTS) version of the app so that people can self-host CoreText. Our "cloud managed" version will be closed sourced but have bleeding edge features slightly upstream from the LTS release. The cloud managed version will be ~$3USD/month. We want to be as FOSSy as possible, but also want to bootstrap the business so that CoreText can have at least 1 full-time employee. I think this is a good plan, but willing to be persuaded otherwise.

Loose thoughts: CoreText will be staunchly anti-algorithm so articles will always be chronologically-sorted by latest/oldest articles. "Suggested articles for you" is one of the lamest things to happen to RSS readers. We also have a healthy disdain for advertising & government so we won't be doing anything weird with user data. We also have a FISA Warrant Canary in case we're forced to comply to any warrants (https://coretext.io/warrant-canary). Lastly, there will never be any kind of platform lock-in so exiting CoreText will always be frictionless whether you're a free/paid customer. We want to honor Aaron Swartz's original vision of RSS as the most popular decentralized & portable layer of the web.

DemocracyFTW2• 2 years ago

Was disappointed at first this is not something I can try right away, but got interested when I saw most of the demo is showing feed items in a "card view" (for lack of a better term) which I nearly always miss from the existing feed readers. I'm currently using a browser extension called FeedBro that works OK-ish but is closed source, I've tried many alternatives but none that stuck. Eager to give this one a go!

mynameyeff6• 2 years ago

Yea I didn't realize that my launch day would fall flat without allowing users to create an account. Rest assured... this isn't vaporware/techbro software!

Re: Cards. I just posted a tweet on our account showing how you can change from cards, to a regular list view. See: https://x.com/coretext_io/status/1836034921028325615

I'm building a 100% keyboard-driven RSS reader

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