Welcome to Porifera

Beta Download

What is it?

Porifera is a newsfeed reader. Readers like this enable you to get all of your news, social feeds, and other web content in one place instead of having to open a lot of browser tabs with different websites in them for different news sources. It also avoids having to deal with ads, popups and cookie warnings.

Contact

You can talk about this software and share your feeds with others on the discord channel. The source code is available for the client and the server.

Where do I find feeds?

If you paste a link from a web page, Porifera automatically discovers RSS feeds on that page. This not only covers the usual news websites, blogs and podcast, but it also supports twitter (users not hashtags), mastodon (users and hashtags), youtube, reddit, and many more. If Porifera does not find a feed on the site you are using, there may still be one. A lot of websites have rss links somewhere at the bottom, especially news websites, blogs and podcasts. Look for the words 'RSS' 'Atom' 'Syndication' and the icon. . Simply right click on the link and select 'copy link', then paste it into Porifera.

There are also search engines just for RSS, like rss search hub

Why?

You might be wondering why I bothered to write my own feed reader, given the number of other ones already available. Well I could never find one that suited my needs. The main thing I wanted that I always had issues finding in other readers is the ability to filter incoming feeds in a reliable and accurate way. I don't want to hear about certain celebrities that get way too much media coverage. I don't want to hear about sport. This wasn't really enough to justify writing an entire piece of software. But then I came up with the idea of allowing the user to republish items. You can also read a more detailed description of the design philosophy of this project.

Republishing?

You can create your own feeds, and as you read stories, simply add the interesting ones to your own feeds. Then other people that share your interests can subscribe to your feeds instead of the raw source. The main point of both a feed reader, and a filtering system is to reduce the amount of stuff you have to look at while looking for the news you need or want to know about. But the average news website still has 20 to 50 stories per day even after the filters are applied. If you are subscribed to a lot of them it can be quite a task to work through everything. In the end you usually only find a few that are really important/interesting/relevant to you. What we really need is curation. So this is what Porifera offers. This means you can benefit from the time and thought other people put into reading the news, and they can benefit from you in the same way.

How does this compare to other social media like Twitter?

Well, it allows people to share and 'retweet' content. But there are huge and important differences:

It is not a popularity contest

You don't know how many people are subscribed to or reading your feeds, and neither does the server owner. The information is simply not there, readers are anonymous and untracked. There is no algorithm that pushes content on random strangers, people have to find your feed wherever you post details of it, and actively decide to subscribe to that content.

It's about users not creators

Porifera simply provides a portal to view content that already exists on the web, and to share and reduce the labour of filtering it. Sure you can publish your latest hot-take, pictures of your genitals or what you had for breakfast on it, but you kind of have to post them somewhere first. Whether it is a blogging website or a facebook page with rss publishing enabled, you need a server somewhere to host it and create an rss feed. This raises the bar from 'oops I was drunk when I posted that' to 'I figured out how to publish my own rss feed on a website', and once you have done that, you already have your own rss feed and you don't need Porifera at all.

You can read and republish content from all over the web

Twitter is a walled garden that forces you to work within their servers and their communities. RSS is federated and communal. With Porifera you can subscribe to whatever you want.

It is open source and not for profit

Being open source means it is owned by the community of users, and not by some corporation or individual. There is no way to censor it and if you don't like the way our team is doing things, you can make your own version - with blackjack, and hookers.

So actually, it's not really anything like twitter.