Sunred

At a glance

Sunred is worth considering if you want a chronological RSS reader with a portable social identity and are comfortable making reading interests public. It combines website subscriptions with follows and article sharing through AT Protocol, with a hosted entry and a self-hosting path. The consequential tradeoff is that its protocol guide describes subscriptions and starred articles as public records. Treat it as a social reader, not a private archive.

Good fit

Readers who want to choose their own sources and exchange articles without a ranked recommendation feed. Sunred documents RSS, Atom and JSON Feed discovery, OPML import, folders and search. Identity and selected social records live on a personal data server, separate from the Sunred instance. That makes changing instances a different proposition from rebuilding an isolated account, although read status, folders and instance settings do not travel with those records.

Consider something else when

Your feed list or bookmarks must stay confidential, or you want an entirely local reader without an account. The feeds guide says subscriptions stay yours alone, but the more specific protocol guide calls them public, and the inspected writer creates subscription records containing feed URLs and starred-article records containing article metadata. Do not rely on the broad privacy wording. Self-hosting also means operating services and databases rather than opening a standalone desktop file.

Start here

The hosted entry reached a handle-based login and a Continue with snrd.social button; no identity approval was performed. If you choose to proceed, understand the public-record behavior before subscribing or starring. The documented next step is the plus beside Feeds: paste a public website or feed URL, inspect its preview and choose Subscribe to this feed. Open an entry and check its read state. These are proposed evaluation steps; no subscription, article share, star or reading workflow was created.

Cost and requirements

The source is MIT-licensed. Self-hosting requires an API, web frontend and PostgreSQL, with a relay and separate database for cross-instance activity. The Compose guide requires explicit database migrations and distinguishes internal from browser-reachable API URLs. Building from current source also needs attention: the API manifest declares Go 1.26 while the README quick start says 1.25 or newer. Hosting, updates and backups remain work for the operator. The inspected public entry did not quote a hosted subscription price.

Limits to know

Protocol documentation separates public follows, shares, stars and feed subscriptions from instance-local folders and read status. It describes synchronization and account movement, but neither federation nor migration was tested. Public-network copies are a different deletion problem from a local unread flag; no complete deletion behavior was established. The README also mentions optional telemetry, without establishing whether this hosted instance enables it. Login and selected source inspection do not prove feed-fetch reliability, import fidelity, accessibility or the quality of the reading experience.

Still unclear

• Feed discovery, OPML import and the authenticated reading workflow were not tested.
• Cross-instance synchronization, complete state migration and deletion behavior were not verified.