OurSS is an RSS reader that a small group shares. Follow the sites you like, see what your friends are reading, and comment on the exact line that got you. We'll host your community from $12 a month, or you can run it yourself for free.
A few of us wanted somewhere to read the same things and talk about them. Group chats bury a good link in an hour. Social networks hand the room to whoever posts most.
So I built OurSS for our own group, and we've been reading in it since. Each of us follows the sites we like. When somebody shares a piece or comments on a line, the rest of us see it. Articles fade after two days and go to the archive after seven, so nobody comes back to 400 unread.
We don't run ads, and there's no algorithm choosing what you see. The code is open source and you can run it on your own server for free. If you'd rather skip the server, we'll host your community for a flat monthly price. Hosting is the only thing we sell.
Select a passage and write a note beside it. Your friends see the highlight when they read the piece, and they can reply under your note.
Threads stay one level deep, so a conversation about a sentence stays next to that sentence.
Today, Recent and Fading are the whole inbox. Anything older than a week moves to the archive by itself.
Move through the list with j and k, and what your friends shared sits at the top.
Friends lists every piece somebody shared or commented on, newest conversation first. Open one and you land on the passage they were talking about.
The reader works in any phone browser. An iPhone app is in beta testing, and it saves articles to read when you're offline.
You pay for the community. Members join free with an invitation from you, and nobody pays per seat.
Up to 25 members
$12a month
Up to 100 members
$25a month
Any size, your server
$0MIT license
Hosting isn't self-serve yet. Email us and we'll set your community up by hand.
Most blogs, newsletters and news sites publish a feed of their new posts. A reader collects the feeds you choose in one place, in order, with nothing added.
Only the people you invite. Joining takes an invitation code from an admin, and comments are visible to members only.
Yes. Every member can export their own data, and we'll hand you a full backup that restores on your own server with one command.
Only if you want it. The weekly digest uses a language model to summarize what your group read and discussed. It's off unless you turn it on.
OurSS is built for groups where people know each other: a class, a studio, a family, a team. Past a hundred members, write to us first.
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