By skyforbes 
It’s been more than a year since Fread was launched, and we have been continuously optimizing the product experience and providing more rich features, and there are some big changes recently, so here is the introduction of the main features of the latest version of Fread.
At present, Fread’s support for mammoth has been relatively perfect, most of the features have been realized, Bluesky is mainly lack of message push and private messaging, for posting and browsing interactions are basically supported, RSS protocol is relatively simple, so it’s not troublesome to support it, but it lacks the function of automatic pulling, in the future, we’ll consider adding this function, and may also provide background services to speed up the content retrieval. We will consider adding this feature in the future, and may also provide background services to accelerate the acquisition of content.
The main features and changes are as follows:
- Onboarding process optimization
- Adding Mastodon content for those who are not logged in
- Pixelfed support
- Mixed Feeds (RSS+Bluesky+Mastodon)
- Profile Tab UI overhaul
- Search your own or others’ posts
- User details page revamp
- Multiple accounts in the same instance
- Auto-synchronization for selected accounts in multiple tabs
- Publish a post to multiple accounts at the same time
- Mastodon quote posts
- Message notification revamp
- Open posts from other accounts
- Default open timeline position
- Post content size settings
- Dynamic colors
- More localization support
- New donation channels
- Roadmap
Onboarding Process
Recently, a big change is to provide three types of content for users to choose when adding content, and then enter the next step to start adding specific content information. Previously, we just need users to input any content, and Fread will judge which type of content to add according to the user’s input, although this operation is much simpler, but I found that it is very easy to cause confusion to the users, and many people don’t know how to add their desired content. Although this operation is simpler, I found that it is easy to confuse the users, many people don’t know how to add the type of content they expect, so Fread provides a page to select the type of content, which is easier to understand, that is, the page in the figure below.
In addition, the search function in the add content page has been improved, now you can input the user name or user’s Handle, WebFinger, Home Page URL in the input box to search the user, and you can also input the instance name to search the instance directly.
Unregistered Content Support
Another feature of Fread that has gained some popularity is the ability to browse the content of a Mastodon instance without logging in. Although different instances have different restrictions on login status, many instances allow browsing of local and cross-site timelines without logging in, which can be useful for those who don’t want to sign up for more accounts, but want to browse the content of other instances at the same time. This is useful for users who don’t want to sign up for more accounts but still want to view the content of other instances.
The way to use it is also very simple, in the last step of adding instances, do not click the login button below and go directly back, because when you see the Fread message that the instance has been added to Fread, you can see it in the drawer on the home page without logging in.
Pixelfed Support
Since Pixelfed also supports ActivityPub protocol, it is easy to be compatible with it, but Pixelfed supports ActivityPub protocol partially, so we encountered some problems at the beginning, but they were solved soon.
Currently, Fread can be used as a Pixelfed client, and in the future, we will consider to support Pixelfed view mode, that is, the posts in the timeline will be displayed according to Pixelfed’s UI.
Mixed Feeds
From the very beginning, one of the design goals of Fread is to break through the content barriers of various platforms, so Fread has always supported the creation of mixed feeds, select Mixed Content when adding content, and then you can add different content sources, not only RSS, but also Mastodon’s users or Bluesky’s users, after the completion of creation, Fread will create a feed that contains all the contents of the feed. When you’re done, Fread will create a feed that includes all of your sources.
Profile Module
One of the main features of Fread is its multi-account support, mainly in terms of interaction, so users don’t need to do any account switching, and as such, all logged-in accounts are effectively equal and are displayed flat in the Profile Tab.
Profile, as one of the four Tabs on the homepage, has also made a lot of changes, mainly to optimize the UI, first of all, removing a few shortcut buttons at the bottom of each account, mainly because the meaning of these buttons is a bit unclear, and it’s not a high-frequency operation, but it can be done by going to the user’s detail page directly.
Another optimization is the style of the account card, new Banner display and attention information, the changed look is shown in the picture below.
Multi-Tab Selected Accounts Automatically Synchronize
If you look closely, you will find a green dot behind the username of the account in the center of the picture above, which is also a recently added feature.
In the first three Tabs on the home page, users can switch the content or account by sliding or Popup, for example, when you view the content of account A on the home page, you can right-slide to switch to the content of account B or click on the left drawer bar to switch the content, which means that the main body of the account that you are currently browsing has changed, and then the other Tabs will switch to the corresponding main body of the account now. The other Tabs will now switch to the corresponding account body. The green dot in the Profile Tab indicates the current account body.
Search for specific user’s posts
There is now a new search button at the top of the user details page, which can be used to search for posts by that user (including your own), although due to Mastodon’s own limitations, it may not be possible to search for all of someone else’s posts.
User details page revamp
The main change to the user details page is the removal of the About tab, which has been moved up to the header. Then we added the “Likes” and “Favorites” tabs.
Multiple Accounts in One Instance
If you have multiple accounts in one instance, you can now log into Fread at the same time.
The initial release didn’t support this mainly because the architecture was designed to make it easier to just pretend it didn’t exist, but it turned out that some users did have this need (including myself), so I spent some time refactoring the account system.
Posting
One of the important changes in the posting section is that it supports multiple accounts to post at the same time, that is to say, you can post a post through multiple accounts at the same time. The page entrance is in the upper right corner of the posting page, there is an icon button for adding users, click it to enter the following page.
You can select multiple accounts here, and the posting configuration (word count, language, media) will vary depending on the list of accounts you select.
In the future I’d also like to support adding X accounts, since X’s posting interface seems to be free, and it would be a nice feature to add, at least for me.
Another change is that for Mastodon posting, when you select an image it doesn’t start uploading immediately, it starts uploading after you click publish, this is mainly for future new features, in the future the plan is to exit the current page directly after clicking the post button and request the network in the background.
Quoting Posts
Although the quoted post feature has been discussed many times within Mastodon, Mastodon finally supports the ability to quote posts. Since Bluesky already supports quoting, Fread actually has the ability to display quoted posts and publish quoted posts, so it’s very quick to support this ability now.
First of all, on the posting page, if the instance where the account is located supports quoting, then the posting page will have a setup button for setting quoting permissions to set the scope of quoting permissions for the post.
In terms of quoting other posts, if the instance where the current account subject is located supports quoting, then clicking on the post’s forward button will bring up a pop-up window for choosing between forwarding and quoting, and for cases where you don’t have quoting privileges or the instance where the post is located doesn’t support quoting, the quoting button will be rendered unclickable.
Notification revamp
The UI of the notification page has also been changed.
One is to remove the unknown message types, due to the change of Mastodon/Bluesky’s interface, there will be some new message types from time to time, in the past, we used to display the Json returned by the interface directly, although it has some effect, but it looks very ugly, so now we remove it, and don’t display the unknown message types, instead I will look at the interface documentation regularly and add the new message types.
The second is the notification UI changes, mainly for the notification of new attention users, now the card style is richer, similar to the Profile Tab’s account card, and a new Follow Back button.
In addition, new notification types related to references have been added.
Posts
The style of the post is not likely to change much anymore, the main body is basically the same, with some optimization on the details, a new Thread Label is added to the reply post, the Label position at the top is changed, and there are some adjustments on the font, margin, and color.
Open posts through other accounts
For any post, users can click the More button to select “Open by other account”, then a popup window will appear with a list of currently logged in users, after users select one of the users, Fread will open the detail page of the post with the user as the main body, so you can quickly interact with the same post with multiple identities. This allows you to quickly interact with the same post in multiple capacities.
Default Timeline Position
Previously, the logic of Fread is to open the homepage timeline every time to locate the latest post that the user has read, but the actual use of the experience is not good, now in the settings to provide options to set the default behavior, which includes two options: the latest position and the last read position.
For this site timeline cross-site timeline and the trend list will open the latest post, here the settings are applied to the home page timeline.
Post Size Settings
Fread provides three kinds of post content size, users can choose the appropriate size in the settings, the size will be applied not only to the text, but also to images, margins, etc., in order to maintain a relatively appropriate visual experience.
Dynamic Colors
Some time ago, Fread provided support for dynamic colors.
The new “Dynamic Colors” feature in Android 12 allows users to personalize their device to achieve a consistent color palette based on their personal wallpaper’s color scheme or by selecting a color in the wallpaper selector.
Users can now click on Theme color in Settings and select Follow system, so that the Fread’s color scheme will follow the system’s color scheme, thus maintaining the consistency of the overall color scheme. My own experience is still good, more beautiful than a fixed color.
However, the primary and tertiary colors in Fread are fixed and will not change with the settings.
Localization
Currently Fread supports 10 languages, the supported languages are as follows:
- English
- Simplified Chinese
- Traditional Chinese — Taiwan
- Traditional Chinese — Hong Kong
- German
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Japanese
- Portuguese
- Russian
Drag and Drop Sorting of Content
Just in case anyone doesn’t know, the list of content in the drawer bar on the left side of the Fread home page can be sorted by dragging.
In addition, you can click the settings button on the right side of the content to enter the content settings page, which can also be dragged and sorted.
If the content is Bluesky, you can still drag and sort on the settings page, the experience here is much better than the official Bluesky app.
However, there is a difference between Mastodon and Tab drag sorting and Bluesky’s Tab drag sorting, Mastodon doesn’t provide sorting ability officially, so the sorting here is saved locally, while Bluesky provides sorting ability for Tab officially, so the sorting here will call Bluesky’s interface to sort, that is to say, it will affect the web and official app. That is to say, it will affect the web page and the official app.
Open Source
Fread has become an open source project this year, the project address is:
https://github.com/0xZhangKe/Fread
Roadmap
Although there is no clear plan, there will be some things to do in the short term, but we can’t be sure of the specific time and order.
- Post list translation, with the help of third-party translation interface.
- Support for opening Bluesky or Mastodon links via Deep Link.
- Native AI to generate images instead of text (actually already done, but I haven’t been on it without a test device).
- Background posting.
- Manually set compression for posting images.
- Default mute/unmute settings for fullscreen video pages.
A little bit of planning for the future:
- iOS version, because of the use of KMP so the iOS version support will not be very complicated, but at present there is a lot of need to adapt to the workload of the naked eye, so I have been lazy to get.
- Login to X account for co-posting.
- Accelerate RSS content or hybrid content acquisition.
Add a new donation channel
There are literally 0 people who care about this. But I’ll say it anyway, there’s now a new donation channel, Domestic Love Power.
Learn more about Fread Features and Midterm Review