Sources and subscriptions

Sources are the feeds News Dashboard uses to discover articles. Your source subscription controls which feeds are active for your account.

Source kinds

Kind	What it means
rss_feed	A standard RSS or Atom feed.
github_release_feed	A GitHub releases Atom feed.
trending_feed	Hacker News or GitHub trending feeds.
scraped_page	A custom parser for pages that do not expose a suitable feed.
reddit_feed, lobsters_feed, mastodon_feed	Community feeds with their own fetchers.

Default sources cover Python, AI/LLM, agents, cloud infrastructure, engineering, trending news, and repositories. They are seeded when the instance is initialized.

Managing sources

From the Sources page you can enable, disable, add, or remove sources. You can also inspect health information such as last checked time, last successful fetch, last error, fetched count, and inserted count.

Choose Add source to open Add private source. Select RSS Feed, Reddit, Lobsters, or Mastodon, then enter a name and feed URL. Test source previews entries before you save. You can set a category, optional slug, and high priority, then choose Add source. The new source belongs to your account. GitHub releases, trending feeds, and custom scrapers also appear among the instance's predefined sources; they are not choices in this dialog.

Use a source's switch to enable or disable it without removing it. On shared sources the switch controls your subscription; on your private sources it controls whether that source is enabled.

Source health

• ok: the most recent successful fetch (or checked time if none succeeded) is no more than 48 hours old, with no recorded error.
• stale: that timestamp is older than 48 hours, or no fetch is recorded.
• error: the last fetch recorded an error; inspect its message.

A source that responds successfully can still return no new articles. Compare fetched and inserted counts before assuming ingestion failed. For errors, check the feed URL and use Test source when adding a corrected source; persistent failures may require the instance operator to investigate.

Import and export OPML

Any signed-in user can move feed subscriptions between readers with OPML. Open Feeds → Sources (/feeds); Import OPML and Export OPML are in the toolbar above the source list.

To import, choose Import OPML and select an .opml or .xml file exported from your previous reader. Imported feeds become private RSS sources for your account. The OPML Import Result panel reports how many feeds were added, skipped, or failed. Expand Skipped to see reasons such as duplicates; failed entries show their feed URL and error so you can correct them and retry.

Choose Export OPML to download subscriptions.opml. It contains only your enabled RSS-type (rss_feed) sources, including subscribed shared sources and your enabled private sources. It does not include articles, reading state, or stars. Other source kinds, including GitHub releases, trending feeds, and scraped pages, are not covered by OPML.

Import limits

The server accepts files up to 5 MiB (5,242,880 bytes) and 1,000 outlines by default. Folder outlines count toward the outline limit even when they do not contain a feed URL. Split larger exports into smaller OPML files and import them separately.

If a limit is exceeded, the result panel shows Import failed followed by one of these messages (the numbers reflect the server's configured limits):

• OPML file too large (max 5242880 bytes); split it into smaller files and import them separately
• OPML file has too many outlines (1001, max 1000); split it into smaller files

The size error returns HTTP 413; the outline error returns HTTP 400. Instance operators can change these limits with the server environment variables MAX_OPML_IMPORT_BYTES (bytes) and MAX_OPML_IMPORT_OUTLINES (outline count).

For the import/export endpoints, see the Sources and ingestion API reference.

Noise controls

Broad feeds are capped so one noisy source does not dominate the Today Feed. Typical caps are 15 to 20 items for broad trending feeds, 5 items for dense newsletter feeds, and around 50 items for curated blog feeds.

On multi-user instances, source subscriptions are per-user. Your changes affect your account only.