Launched this week
Pharion
Your feed. Your identity. No algorithm
10 followers
Your feed. Your identity. No algorithm
10 followers
Pharion auto-detects RSS feeds from any URL, turns them into a beautiful personal feed, and gives you a public page to share your curation as your identity. No algorithm. Just what you choose to read. our RSS sources into a public curator page that represents you. Aggregate, read, and share your feeds — no algorithm.
How does Pharion handle feeds that update extremely frequently, like dozens of items per hour — does it batch or dedupe, or just dump everything into the timeline as it comes in?
@hsangzkencbss Great question — and honestly one of the more interesting edge cases.
Here's how it works today:
Pharion caches feeds every 15 minutes via a background job. At the database level, items
are deduplicated by URL — so if the same article appears in 3 consecutive fetches, it's stored
once. No duplicates in the timeline.
For high-frequency sources (HN, Reddit, live blogs), this means you get batches every 15 min rather than a real-time stream — which is intentional.
A firehose of 40 items arriving live is closer to Twitter than to a reading experience.
Items are always sorted by pub_date, not ingestion time, so the order is coherent even when batches arrive together.
Two things NOT done yet:
- Smart throttling per source (capping high-volume sources at N items per cycle regardless of output)
- Relevance scoring within a high-volume source
Both are on the roadmap. The smart cap is actually close to shipping — some sources
like Reddit r/all would otherwise dominate the entire timeline.
Does that cover what you were wondering about, or are you thinking about a specific use case?
Curious how this handles feeds that get taken down or change URLs over time — do broken sources get flagged automatically, or do I have to keep tabs on that myself?
Hi@enoljrot
Thanks for your question!
Broken feeds get flagged automatically — you don't need to babysit them.
Every source is refreshed in the background and shows a colored health dot in your Sources list:
🟢 Green — active and publishing recently
🟠 Amber — no new article in 7+ days
🔴 Red — fetch failed or hasn't been checked in 48h
⚪ Grey — newly added, not checked yet
If a feed goes down or starts returning errors, it turns red and you can hover/tap the dot to see the issue, open the URL to verify it, or disable/delete the source in one click.
One caveat: if a feed changes its URL (e.g., the site moves from /rss to /feed.xml), the app can't auto-discover the new address — you'll need to update or re-add the source. But you'll know immediately that something changed because the health indicator switches from green to red/amber.
So for "is this feed dead?" — fully automatic. For "this feed moved to a new URL" — one manual update once you notice the flag.
Auto-detecting the RSS feed from any URL works surprisingly well, saved me the usual copy-paste hunt. The public curator page feels clean and personal, like my own little reading digest without the algorithm noise.
Thank you very much @zcanyelkenzudp !
Dropped in a few of my favorite sites and it pulled the feeds automatically without me hunting for XML links. The shared page feels clean and personal, like my own little corner of the web instead of another feed reader trying to push stuff on me.
@tahsinyndat2js Thank you very much for the support.
the auto-detect RSS from any URL is such a thoughtful touch, no copy-pasting feed links or hunting through source code. that alone removes the biggest friction point that keeps most people from using readers in the first place.
@etinccch Thanks for your comment, I do agree and I'm also convinced this product targets uncovered part of this landscape.