Follow and manage feeds
Follow a site, check it now, choose how long its posts stay, or unfollow it.
Follow a feed
Paste an address into Follow a feed or site… at the top of Reading. Any RSS or Atom feed works, and so does a site that advertises one. Your plan sets how many you follow: 20 on Free, 200 on Paid and 500 on Premium.
A feed's page
Pick a feed under Feeds in the sidebar to see only its posts. Its header says when it was last checked and, if checks are failing, why. Two buttons sit there: Check feed and Mark feed read. Everything else is under More actions:
- Pin: see Pin feeds above your queue.
- Notify me about this feed: see Get notified about new posts.
- Keep link parameters, below.
- How long these posts stay, below.
- Which folder this feed reads in: see Group feeds into folders.
- Unfollow, below.
How often feeds are checked
Each feed is checked as often as it publishes: every 15 min for a feed posting ten times a day, daily for a quiet one, and weekly once it has been silent for a month. A feed that publishes almost nothing moves to the Quiet group at the bottom of the sidebar.
To look sooner, press Check feed on its page, or Check all on Reading.
How long posts stay
Open More actions → How long these posts stay and pick a span. Older posts leave your queue, read or not. Saved posts always stay. A new feed keeps its posts forever until you choose otherwise.
| Span | Posts stay for |
|---|---|
| Breaking | 3 hours |
| News | 18 hours |
| Articles | 3 days |
| Essays | 2 weeks |
| Evergreen | Forever |
When a busy feed keeps everything, its page suggests a shorter span so it doesn't become a backlog.
Keep link parameters
Reader removes tracking parameters from the links a feed gives. If a site's links break without them, choose More actions → Keep link parameters and the links open exactly as published. Strip link parameters turns the cleaning back on.
Unfollow a feed
Choose More actions → Unfollow and confirm.