An independent reading desk

Dispatch

Politics. Technology. What comes next.

Your sources. A wider view.

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Preparing your edition…

The reading room

Your edition

Open the original. Follow the conversation. Read beyond the headline.

Build your edition

Sources

Choose publications individually. Left-leaning publications are opt-in and start switched off. Source groupings describe editorial selections, not ratings of accuracy.

Add your own source

An RSS or Atom feed works best. You can also try a publication’s site URL; feed discovery depends on what the site makes publicly available. Custom sources follow your account in cloud mode, or stay on this device in guest mode.

Behind the edition

Engineering & editorial notes

Real metadata, not invented reporting

Headlines, photographs and expandable abstracts come from sources and publisher metadata when available. Open Graph is a publisher’s preview, not fact verification. An abstract may be only a short feed description, not a summary of the full reporting.

Original articles and discussion threads are distinct destinations. Hacker News or Reddit conversations should have their own links, separate from the reporting they discuss.

What retrieval cannot do

The server proxy retrieves public pages. It cannot execute a site’s JavaScript, bypass paywalls, sign in to a publisher, or guarantee access. Some sites block retrieval or provide incomplete previews. Failed sources should show their status and offer retry without removing the last good edition.

A publicly accessible image or Open Graph tag does not guarantee hotlink or reuse rights. Images may be blocked, withdrawn or unavailable. Credits should be retained where supplied; unrelated stock or generated illustrations must not stand in as news photography.

An edition is an editorial choice

Default sources and political groupings are editorial selections, not inferred objective truth or reliability scores. Left-leaning sources are available but disabled initially. You can adjust individual publications and add your own.

Dates, duplicates & offline editions

Syndicated articles, tracking redirects and inconsistent canonical links can leave duplicates. RSS publication dates can be missing, inaccurate or changed after an edit. Fetch time is not publication time.

If live retrieval fails, a dated archive may keep the page useful. Archive or offline material must be identified as such, never presented as breaking or freshly fetched news.

Your reading history

Cloud mode stores your preferences, custom sources and reading history in your own Popchat storage. Guest mode keeps a local fallback on this device and does not synchronize across devices.

Read stories stay in place while you browse and rank lower in later unread-first editions. History is bounded: above 100,000 entries, the oldest entries are pruned. Dispatch can prune only its own storage, never unrelated user data. Sync failures should remain visible rather than implying that unsaved changes reached the cloud.

Tools that would improve this

  • A bounded batch metadata endpoint with timeouts, rate limits and partial-failure reporting.
  • Canonical redirect resolution with provenance and safe URL handling.
  • An image proxy with explicit rights, attribution and cache controls.
  • A scheduled feed cache with freshness indicators and retained last-good responses.