Adding and Managing Sources

Sources decide what arrives; the ranking only decides what you see first. So this is the part worth spending time on.

Everything below starts from Discover Sources in the sidebar.

Paste a link

The default. Paste a site address — stratechery.com, arstechnica.com, a blog you read — and Feedpik looks for its feed.

Most sites advertise one in their HTML and resolve on the first try. Some do not: modern JavaScript-rendered sites often publish a feed without mentioning it anywhere on the page, so a site that definitely has RSS can still come back empty. When that happens, look for an RSS icon on the site itself, or try /feed, /rss or /atom.xml after the domain. A direct feed URL always works.

From another reader

If you already use Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire, Reeder or anything else that speaks OPML, this brings everything across at once and is by far the fastest way to a useful feed.

Export an OPML file from your current reader, then import it in Discover Sources. Folders come across as folders.

Feedpik exports OPML too, from the same place. That is deliberate and worth knowing before you invest an afternoon here: your subscriptions are never trapped in this product. If you leave, you leave with them.

Specific kinds of source

The Discover panel has an entry point for each of these, and each takes what you would naturally paste.

Source	What to paste
Reddit	A subreddit or user link — reddit.com/r/programming. Posts arrive in full.
Mastodon	@user@instance.social, or a profile URL from any instance
Bluesky	An @handle or a bsky.app profile link
Substack	Any publication URL
Podcast	An Apple Podcasts link, which resolves to the show's own feed, or a direct RSS URL
YouTube	A channel link or @handle. Note that videos open on YouTube — the reader has no player yet

Newsletters

Newsletters do not have feeds, so Feedpik gives you a private inbox address instead. Subscribe to a newsletter using that address and every issue lands in your reader like any other article.

The address is yours alone and is not tied to the email you signed in with, so your personal inbox stays out of it.

Paid subscriptions

Paid newsletters — Substack, Ghost, Patreon and similar — give each subscriber their own private RSS link. Paste it under Paid subscription and it works like any other feed.

That link is a credential: anyone holding it reads your paid subscription. Feedpik treats it as one. It is masked in the interface, and it is never included when you share a persona or publish a pack — the sharing code detects private feed URLs by shape (per-subscriber path patterns, tokens and keys in the query string) and skips them, rather than trusting anyone to remember. If you share a persona built partly on paid feeds, the free sources go and the paid ones stay behind.

Packs and personas

Two ways to get a whole set at once, and they are not the same thing.

A pack is a bundle of sources on a subject. Installing one adds those sources to what you already have. Nothing else changes.

A persona is an entire reading space — its own sources, its own preferences, its own ranking algorithm. Installing a community persona creates a new persona on your account, with all of it. The one you are using now is untouched, and you switch between them at the top of Algorithm & Agents.

Use a pack to add subject coverage to your existing feed. Use a persona when you want a separate space — work and personal, or a field you dip into occasionally without wanting it mixed into your morning reading.

Managing what you have

Folders group subscriptions in the sidebar. A source can sit in one, and OPML import puts things where the exported file had them.

Removing a source unsubscribes you from it in the current persona only. Other personas keep theirs.

A source you ignore costs you nothing. The ranking notices what you never open and stops leading with it, so there is no need to prune for tidiness. Prune when a source is genuinely wrong for you, not to keep a number down.

When a feed will not work

Nothing was found at that address — the site may publish a feed without advertising it. Look for an RSS icon on the site, or try /feed or /rss after the domain.

The source was added but has no articles — some feeds publish rarely, and Feedpik only shows what has arrived since you subscribed. If it is still empty after a day, the feed may have moved; remove it and re-add from the site address.

It stopped updating — publications change feed URLs more often than you would think, usually without redirecting the old one. Re-adding from the site address picks up the current one.

Everything from one source is in a language I do not read — that is a per-source thing rather than a setting; remove it. Language preferences apply to the shared discovery pool, not to sources you chose yourself.