Lenns.io

The feed reader
for people that want to be in control

The world through your Lenns

Reader

A simple and effective feed reader that allows you to track new content. It works with standard RSS and Atom sources as well as 90% of all generic websites.

Control

Be in control of the content you consume. You can set the priority of every feed source or category, as well as the number of items to list per day.

The Story

These days we are exposed to gazillions of new articles every day. One of the problems with that is that it slowly centralizes the sources we consume information from. For example, many people either consume information from Facebook or Twitter only, or they add to that one or two "News" websites. Conventional RSS Readers solve that problem to some extent. However, they have a few significant flaws.

  • First - some sources post so often that they overtake your dashboard or category.
  • Second - all sources have the same weight. Quite often, you'd be happy to follow a particular website or blog, but you'd prefer if it didn't take a central place on your reader's list.
  • Third - many of the websites you visit don't support RSS.

The Solution

Lenns.io tries to regard and solve all of the above problems in a simple and efficient way. How does it happen?

First - every source (e.g. your favourite News website, blog, Reddit, Hacker News, anything) has only one item per day on your feed. It is the last published one for blogs (RSS feeds) or the most popular one for News websites. If you want more, you can easily increase that number.

Second - you can set different priorities per source or by category. That could be very effective to push the most interesting to you posts at the top of your dashboard. For instance, everything in the "Competitors" category could have high priority, and every time a source from it publishes, it will be at the top of your feed. I.e. you are in control and not a black box algorithm.

Third - Lenns.io give you the ability to follow the homepages of almost any website, even if it doesn't support RSS. This is something crucial that conventional RSS readers just can't do.

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

Once you start using Lenns.io, you will immediately notice one big difference compared to conventional Feed Readers. You can't read posts' content here. As most blogs and websites don't export the full content of their posts, that leads to a mixed reading experience. Quite often, you click the title of a post within a conventional reader only to see that there's nothing there apart from another link to the original post.

As being a bit opinionated, Lenns.io skips that step and always links to the original post. That has some benefits. It saves you one click (in many cases), and it gets you the real experience that the author has built.

👨‍💻 Who built Lenns.io?