This article covers a new free desktop RSS Reader app for social feeds, Reddit, YouTube, SoundCloud, and all the other RSS feeds. RSS feeds are really helpful to consume information from the various resources in a single place. Many of the popular RSS readers are limited to RSS feeds only and not all the sources that you follow might not have RSS feeds like social media, YouTube, etc.
Fraidycat is a free desktop RSS reader app that serves as a one-stop solution for all the information from various sources. This app is a multi-purpose RSS reader that not only works with RSS feeds but can also fetch feeds from a website, social media platform, YouTube, Reddit, SoundCloud and more.
Since this app brings so many sources together, it allows you to create categories to easily manage the information in different tabs. On top of that, you can also select how frequently you want it to refresh the data by setting importance from real-time to hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Also read: Get Your Notes in your RSS Feed Daily to Remember them Easily
Free Multi-purpose Desktop RSS Reader App: Fraidycat
Fraidycat is available as a standalone app for Windows, macOS, and Linux. There are also browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. In case you don’t want to install the app, you can use the extension to integrate it into your workflow. This allows you to access Fraidycat on devices like ChromeOS, Rasberry Pi, etc.
How to Add a Follow?
Initially, this app opens an empty feed with an option to add a new follow and access the settings. With the “+” option, you can add a new follow to the feeds. Simply enter the URL of the RSS feeds, website, or anything that you want to see in your feeds. After that, select the importance of the following to pick the refresh interval. By adding just these two pieces of information, you can add the following to your feeds. When you do that, this app fetches the URL and offers you RSS feeds of the domain is available. In case RSS feeds are not available on a domain, it automatically fetches the latest posts from the URL.
While adding a new follow, you also get options to add tags and title for the follow. The tags serve as categories that keep the feeds sorted. The title is shown in front of the feed to let you know the source.
Fraidycat Feeds
The tags you create while adding new follows appear in your feeds. You can select a tag to view the feeds from that particular category. When you select a tag category, it shows you an update interval of the source at the top.
Instead of showing each new post separately, this app groups them by source. The source with the latest updates gets at the top. You can simply click on the source name to expand all the feeds. Alongside the source name, you also get an edit option that allows you to make changes to the respective follow if needed.
Import/Export
If you are already using an RSS reader then you can import your settings to this one and bring all your data to Fraidycat. There are three ways to import/export data”
- JSON: This method saves all the settings with follows.
- OPML: This method only backup follows, nothing else.
- HTML: This method is only to export a list of your follows as an HTML bookmark list.
Closing Words
Fraidycat is a very useful multi-purpose RSS Reader that lets you gather and consume information from various sources in one place. It doesn’t use any algorithms instead it just shows you the feeds in a dedicated category. Also, there are no ads or any other type of clutter. Since it doesn’t use account, it doesn’t sync your data across devices or clients. However, you can use the import/export feature to manually sync your data.
