Introducing Freed
Your feeds, your way, on all your devices.
The chronological feed was quietly killed by every major social platform. Did it fail? Only to exploit you.
What replaced it? Psychological warfare to keep you addicted. Outrage gets amplified because it's engaging. Infinite scroll removes the natural rest point. Variable reward schedules, the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive, keep you pulling down to refresh. None of this is accidental. Billions of dollars in engineering talent were deployed specifically to exploit the gaps in human cognition.
I built Freed because we can do better.
What Freed Is
Freed is a local-first feed reader. It captures content from the sources you choose: social platforms, RSS feeds, YouTube channels, newsletters, and podcasts. Everything lands in a vault on your device, live-synced to your phone. You get a unified, chronological feed of everything you care about, ranked the way you decide. Your algorithm, your rules. The platforms become players in your game.
- No central servers. Your content lives on your device, synced between your own devices via Google Drive, iCloud, or Dropbox. I never see it.
- No engagement optimization. Posts are ranked by criteria you set: author trust, topic relevance, freshness. Not by what made someone else angry yesterday.
- You can be done. Freed tracks what you've read. When you've seen everything from your subscribed sources, you're caught up. There's an actual end.
- Ulysses Mode. Configure Freed as the only way you access social platforms. You get the content without the compulsion. Named after the hero who lashed himself to the mast so he could hear the Sirens without losing his mind.
- Open source. MIT licensed. Read it, fork it, audit it.
How It's Built
Freed runs as a desktop app (macOS, Windows, Linux) that captures content in the background using your existing browser sessions. A companion PWA at app.freed.wtf syncs with the desktop when you're on the same network and falls back to your cloud storage when you're not. The architecture is deliberately local-first: if Freed shuts down tomorrow, your data and your app keep working.
Where Things Stand
RSS capture is working. X and Save for Later are coming soon. The desktop app and mobile reader are in active development.
How You Can Help
- Star the repo⭐ It signals that this matters and helps others find it.
- Try the PWA📱 Add some RSS feeds and tell me what's broken.
- Contribute🛠️ Especially if you know Rust/TypeScript or have ideas for additional capture sources.
- Share 🤍 Pass along to a friend who's complained about social media lately. We can win, together!
What's Next
- Desktop-to-phone sync over LAN
- Notarized, downloadable desktop app for macOS
- Windows and Linux builds
- Cloud sync (Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud)
- Facebook and Instagram capture
I'll post an update when each of these ships. Follow along!