What's next for Lighthouse?

A system that helps you find valuable content first needs to have access to it. The most important data to get is the content itself, but there is a lot of useful metadata as well.

This information forms the foundation on which the rest is built. And the next step of Lighthouse is to strengthen this foundation. The features that are next in line all serve that purpose.

URL-based deduplication

If you subscribe to sources that aggregate content, for example Hacker News, it can happen that the same article is published by more than one source.

Currently, Lighthouse creates a new item every time an article is published. The result is that the same article might appear multiple times in your inbox.

With URL-based deduplication, instead of having multiple items for the same article, there will only be one, but with multiple sources listed.

Parsing improvements

Parsing typically refers to extracting the main content of articles. But there is more data that can be extracted.

Some content is protected by paywalls. How they're implemented differs per site, sometimes part of the content is displayed, and sometimes nothing at all.

In other cases, the main content is a video or audio podcast.

Besides that, RSS feeds and websites can contain categories in their metadata.

Lighthouse will extract all that information, show it in the UI, and make it available for rules.

Rules

The current rule system, while already powerful, is far from complete. There is much more that can be done to expand automation.

One feature is source rules. Rules that apply to only one specific source. These rules can then also make great use of the feed-defined categories.

Another one is expanding the possible conditions of rules to include metadata like paywall or content type.

Rule testing

Currently there's no way to know beforehand if a rule applies to the items you want it to apply. You have to trust that the created rule matches the intended items.

With this feature it'll be possible to test the rule against existing items and see where it would've matched. This makes creating the right rules much easier.

Digest expansion

Digests, sources that publish links to other content, are a great way to discover new content.

Currently, when you subscribe to a digest source in Lighthouse, you have to manually go through each digest entry, find the interesting articles, and add them.

It'd be much better if it was possible to automatically extract the links and add them to the inbox.

Digest expansion will let you do that.

Keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts are a crucial feature, particularly for power users. They will make it possible to be much faster while using Lighthouse.

Redesign

The technical foundation of Lighthouse works very well, but the design and user experience is clumsy in many places.

A complete overhaul is planned to make Lighthouse much simpler and smoother to use.