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GetStream/Winds

★ 9,120 · JavaScript · BSD-3-Clause · updated Oct 2021

A Beautiful Open Source RSS & Podcast App Powered by Getstream.io

Winds is an RSS reader and podcast client built with React/Redux on the frontend and Express.js on the backend, packaged as both a web app and an Electron desktop app. It was GetStream.io's showcase project for their activity feed API. The repo is officially abandoned as of 2021 and the README says so upfront.

The RSS parser handles a genuinely impressive range of edge cases — the test fixtures include malformed feeds, non-Latin character sets, and over 30 real-world feed sources. The worker architecture using Bull queues separates RSS processing, podcast fetching, and OG scraping into distinct processes, so one slow feed can't block another. The debug CLI commands (`winds rss <url>`, `winds podcast <url>`) are a clean pattern for diagnosing feed issues without firing up the full app. Test structure mirrors the source tree exactly, which makes finding the test for any given module trivial.

It's dead. The maintainers posted the deprecation notice and walked away — no issues, no PRs will be reviewed. The personalization and activity feed features were black-boxed through the GetStream.io API, so if that service changes its terms or pricing, that functionality simply disappears and you have no recourse. Getting a dev environment running requires registering for five external services (Stream, Algolia, MongoDB Atlas, SendGrid, AWS) before a single line of your own code runs — there is no local-only path. The frontend React/Redux code predates hooks and is written in a class-component style that anyone joining the project today would immediately want to rewrite.

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