aRSS

Your friends' websites, in one timeline.

aRSS is an open source, self-hosted RSS reader that feels like a social feed. Subscribe to the people and sites you care about. No algorithm, no ads, no tracking.

Get started on GitHub See how it runs

a Really Simple Syndication app. Yes, it's pronounced the way you think.

The aRSS timeline on desktop: a list of followed feeds on the left and their latest posts, newest first, on the right. The same timeline on a phone.

Why RSS?

RSS has been quietly doing the job for over twenty years. It is still the best way to follow people without a platform in the middle.

Decentralised by design

Every site publishes its own feed. There's no central service to change the rules, rank your posts or switch off.

Owned by the creator

The feed lives on the author's own site, under their own name. You follow the person, not their account on someone else's platform.

Really simple

It's a small text file listing what's new, hence the name. Easy to publish, easy to read and easy to build on.

Extremely versatile

That simplicity means it's already everywhere: blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, newsletters, changelogs.

Publish once, syndicate everywhere. Because so much of the web already speaks RSS, aRSS taps into structures that exist today. It's the POSSE idea: write on your own site first and let the feed carry it wherever people want to read.

What aRSS adds

A friendly, familiar face on the open web.

A timeline, not an inbox

Posts from every feed in one chronological stream, with search, unread tracking and per-feed views. No algorithm deciding what you see.

Run it where you like

Run it locally on your own machine, or deploy it somewhere you trust to keep it safe. It's one small Node server and a SQLite file.

Ask your agent

A built-in MCP service lets your agent of choice search your feeds, so it can find that post you read last month and have since forgotten.

Up and running in a minute

You need Node 22.13 or newer. That's the whole list.

# get the code
git clone https://github.com/aRSS-app/arss-app.git
cd arss-app
npm install

# optional: add a few example feeds
npm run seed

# start the reader
npm start
  1. Clone and install. Dependencies are plain JavaScript, so there's nothing to compile.
  2. Seed some feeds if you'd like something to read straight away, or skip it and add your own.
  3. Open http://127.0.0.1:3333 and paste in any feed URL to subscribe.
  4. Leave it running and each feed refreshes on the schedule you pick.

The story so far

aRSS was conceived back in 2018, as Twitter was taking another turn for the worse. The plan was simple: make it easier to decentralise your social circle's content, with no surveillance capitalism or anti-social algorithms trying to influence your experience.

Like many side projects, it lost traction and motivation. Thanks to agentic (vibe) coding, it has a new lease of life.

It was inspired by Aral Balkan's Reclaiming RSS, and it's built in the open by the people who use it. Ideas, issues and pull requests are all welcome on GitHub.