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FAQ: Questions that get asked about Freshet

It’s a smart RSS reader i.e. instead of giving you just a giant unsorted collection of news items, we give you tools to find the ones you want to read right now. This is done both by showing you the most interesting ones, but also letting you explore the wider collection via automatic tagging.

Really Simple Syndication, which is a way of letting websites (mostly news sites, but also blogs of all forms, and various other things) describe a feed of posts. We support most versions of the standard, as well as Atom.

Most of the time, you can just give us a URL of a website, and we can figure it out from there.

Buttons. More, Meh, Less Every time you finish reading a post, you either click "more" or "less". If you click "more", we know posts like that one are interesting, and if you click "less" we know it wasn't interesting. There's also a "meh" option for the ones you're really not sure about, but we advise not clicking this most of the time as we won't be able to give you better articles if you click that.

There are definitely broken ones out there but it comes down to what you do with them. Our algorithm for displaying “most interesting” is proprietary, so we can’t tell you exactly how it works (and it’s likely to change over time), but we can promise you this: the only thing affecting what posts you see is your More/Less clicks. We don’t do ads, and we don’t accept payment for inserting posts into your feed. We will do our best to make the set of posts you see the most interesting unread items you have, and that’s it.

Right now, our only source of revenue is our Ko-fi. In the future, we may change over to a subscription-based model. In either case, taking money for this from you directly allows us to stay focused on making this a better site, as opposed to say VC money or ads.

To quote Wikipedia “The term freshet is most commonly used to describe a snowmelt, an annual high water event on rivers resulting from snow and river ice melting”. It’s a metaphor for the stream of posts and occasional high water events that is news feeds.

The Freshet “F” was designed by Somhairle Kelly (sam@eithin.co.uk)

If you’ve read all this FAQ, and read the docs, try emailing support@freshet.net and we’ll see if we can help.