A free RSS reader for Mac, with no account and no ads
If you have been looking for a free RSS reader for Mac, here is what Tilde is and what it isn't. It is a small app that reads RSS and Atom feeds. You add the sites you care about, and their new posts show up in one list. That is the whole job. There is no account to create, no ads between articles, and nothing recommended to you that you didn't ask for.
Get Tilde on the Mac App Store Open the web app
What you get on a Mac
The Mac app is free on the Mac App Store, runs on macOS 12 or later, and is a universal app, so it works on both Apple silicon and Intel Macs. It is also small, under 9 MB.
Open it for the first time and you will find it subscribes to nothing. Instead it offers a short picker of 18 feeds, which you can take or ignore. To add your own, paste any site address into the add box (or press a) and Tilde looks for the feed itself. You don't need to hunt down an obscure feed URL first. It understands RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0 and RDF, which covers nearly every blog and news site that still publishes a feed.
Your articles live on your Mac
This is the part I care about most. Every article you open is saved in full on your own computer. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no server holding your reading history.
That has a few practical effects:
- Articles you have opened stay readable offline, on a plane or a bad connection.
- They are full-text searchable. Press / and search everything you have read. The search uses an index, so it stays fast even after years of reading.
- You choose how long things are kept: 3 months, 6 months or 1 year. Articles you have saved with s always stay.
Because there is no account, there is nothing to log in to and nothing to lose access to. The folder where the data lives is described on the support page.
It does not talk through anyone else
The Mac app fetches every feed directly from the site that publishes it. There is no proxy in the middle. Remote images are off by default, since images are a common way for a page to see that you opened it; you can turn them on in Settings if you prefer to see them. Tilde has no trackers and no analytics. The privacy policy says the same in more detail.
A list that ends
The unread count in Tilde only goes down. When you have read what is there, the list ends and tells you that you have reached the end. There is no endless scroll and no algorithm choosing what comes next. That may feel odd at first, but it means you can actually finish.
Reading, quickly
Everything you do often has a key. j and k move through articles, o opens one, m marks it read or unread, s saves it, r refreshes every source, f goes full screen and Esc gets you out again. You can group feeds, and each group keeps its own unread count, which helps if you follow a lot of sites and want to read the quiet ones first.
Some feeds only send a snippet. For those, the Read the full article button fetches the page and pulls out the article text. It only does this when you ask.
Coming from another reader?
Export your feeds as an OPML file from the old reader, then choose Import OPML in Tilde's Settings. Folders become groups. The step-by-step version is on the import OPML page, and the same page covers taking your list back out.
Things worth knowing first
- The Mac app and the web version don't sync. They are separate. To move your feeds from one to the other, export OPML from one and import it into the other.
- Feeds that need a login, or that block automated readers, won't load.
- Tilde is a reader, not a service. It doesn't recommend sites, so you bring your own list.
If you would rather try it before installing anything, the web app at tilde.kjrlabs.in/app is free and works in any browser. Tilde is MIT licensed, and the source is on GitHub. It is made by KJR Labs.
Get Tilde on the Mac App Store Open the web app
For a quick look at what has changed lately, see the changelog, or head back to the Tilde home page.