Introduction

What is Shoebill Feed?

Shoebill Feed is a free, open-source news reader you run yourself — on your own computer, a home server, or a small cloud instance. Instead of an algorithm tuned to keep you scrolling, it collects news only from the sources you choose and organizes it around what you actually read and like.

Core ideas

  • You choose the sources. RSS/Atom feeds, subreddits, email newsletters, Mastodon/Lemmy/Bluesky accounts and hashtags, GitHub releases, Telegram channels, arXiv searches, or a generic scraper for sites without a feed. Nothing appears in your feed that you didn’t deliberately add. See Sources.

  • Custom categories. Define your own topics with a name, color, keywords, and an optional prompt fragment telling the LLM what belongs in it — or pull ready-made ones from a built-in IPTC-based taxonomy instead of writing them by hand. See User Guide.

  • LLM-powered processing. Every article gets a plain-language summary, extracted keywords, a category assignment, and relevance/impact scores — via either a local model (Ollama) or a cloud provider (Anthropic), your choice. See LLM Providers.

  • Learns what interests you, not what sells ads. A 👍/👎 on an article quietly reshapes how your feed is ranked over time, using nothing but your own signal. Every learned weight is visible and adjustable — never a black box. See Learning & Scoring.

  • Related coverage, grouped. When several sources cover the same story, Shoebill clusters them into one card with a synthesized summary of the common ground, instead of showing the same headline five times. See Clustering.

  • Multi-user. Separate accounts, separate feeds, separate learned preferences, all on one instance.

What it isn’t

Shoebill Feed doesn’t try to keep you reading inside the app. Summaries exist to help you decide what’s worth your time — the actual article is always read on the original site, via an outbound link. It’s a triage tool, not a replacement for the sources it aggregates.

License

Shoebill Feed is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPLv3) — the same license Nextcloud uses, chosen specifically so that anyone hosting a modified version keeps their changes open too.