Subscriptions
Automatically collect new posts from creators, channels, and feeds you follow.
Overview
Subscriptions are tied to your Social Archiver account, not to a single device. When a subscription finds new content, the resulting archives sync to supported clients. On mobile, subscription content can be reviewed from the dedicated Subscriptions tab. If you also connect the Obsidian desktop plugin, synced archives can be written into your vault as Markdown when Obsidian is open or when you run sync.
Subscriptions are intended for ongoing updates. They do not replace profile crawl/backfill: mobile subscriptions do not run a profile crawl, do not have a Run Now action, and do not ask you to choose a fetch count.
Premium required
Creating, resuming, manually running, and scheduled execution of subscriptions require a Premium/Pro, Lifetime, or Admin entitlement. Free users are routed to the mobile paywall or shown a Premium-required notice in Obsidian.
Existing subscriptions are preserved if your plan changes. They remain visible and removable, but scheduled runs are skipped while the account does not have subscription entitlement.
Supported Platforms
Mobile New Subscriptions
The mobile app can create new subscriptions for:
- Social profiles: Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, Bluesky, Mastodon
- YouTube channels:
youtube.com/@handle,/channel/...,/c/...,/user/..., and channel RSS URLs - RSS-backed sources: Blog/RSS, Substack, Tumblr, Velog, Medium, Podcast, Naver Blog, Brunch
YouTube subscriptions use the official YouTube Data API for upload discovery and then enrich each new video with the direct YouTube archive pipeline. RSS-backed sources use feed discovery and may ask you to choose a feed when more than one candidate is found.
Not Yet Exposed for New Mobile Subscriptions
The mobile app does not currently create new subscriptions for Pinterest, Reddit, Naver Cafe member feeds, Naver Webtoon, or WEBTOON. Some legacy or Obsidian-created subscriptions for these platforms may still appear in your account.
Public content only
For Facebook and other social platforms, Social Archiver can only subscribe to profiles/pages and posts that are publicly accessible. The mobile app validates Facebook public-post access before creating the subscription and shows an unavailable state when the profile cannot be fetched.
Schedule
Most mobile-created subscriptions run on a conservative server schedule:
- First run: no earlier than 3 hours after creation
- Ongoing runs: about every 3 hours
- YouTube: first run no earlier than 24 hours after creation, then daily
Eligible legacy daily profile subscriptions are normalized to the 3-hour cadence by the server. Platform-specific or excluded subscriptions, such as YouTube and some legacy/local flows, can keep their stored schedule.
Add a Subscription on Mobile
From the Authors Tab
- Open Authors
- Tap the add-subscription action in the header
- Paste a profile, channel, site, or feed URL
- If a copied URL is available, tap Paste copied link
- Review the resolved author/channel/feed preview
- Choose a feed when RSS discovery returns multiple candidates
- Tap Add subscription
If you are on the Free plan, the app first shows a short subscription intro and then opens the paywall.
From an Author Page
Open an author profile from your archives and tap Subscribe. If the profile needs extra metadata, such as a YouTube channel ID or RSS feed URL, mobile resolves it before creating the subscription.
From the Archive Form
When the mobile archive form detects that a URL is a subscription target rather than a single post, the action routes into subscription registration instead of creating a one-off archive.
View Subscription Content on Mobile
Use the top-level Subscriptions tab to see content collected from subscriptions in one place. Existing subscription state is also reflected on author rows, author detail pages, and archive badges where available.
Unsubscribing stops future automatic collection. It does not delete posts that were already archived.
Needs attention
When a server-managed subscription repeatedly fails or the system has to stop it, Manage Subscriptions can show a compact Needs attention entry. Its badge is the number of distinct subscriptions with an active issue. It is separate from unread updates and from the number of failed checks, and opening the list does not clear it.
The attention list distinguishes two states:
- Retrying: automatic checks can continue, and the next retry time is shown when available.
- Stopped: automatic checks have stopped until you take an available action.
The localized reason can identify an account that is missing or private, an invalid or unsupported target, a connection that must be renewed, repeated rate limits, service unavailability, timeouts, or an unknown repeated failure. Raw server errors are not shown.
Available actions depend on the reason:
- Check now starts one recovery check. The item stays in the list until that check completes successfully; starting or queuing it is not success.
- Reconnect opens the existing account-connection flow when that integration needs attention.
- Unsubscribe removes the subscription but keeps posts that were already archived.
A reconnect, unsubscribe, or completed successful check updates the list. A failed recovery check remains in the same issue episode. Subscriptions that you paused yourself, and older disabled subscriptions whose pause source is unknown, are excluded from the attention count and alerts.
Subscription Issue Alerts
The Needs attention alert setting is separate from new-content subscription notifications. There is no alert interval selector. When alert delivery is enabled for an environment, Social Archiver sends at most one attention alert per account in three hours, outside quiet hours. It tries the supported mobile destination first and can fall back to one eligible desktop client; it does not intentionally display the same alert on both.
The visible notification contains only the number of subscriptions needing attention. It does not include an account name, handle, target URL, platform, or raw error. Tapping it opens /subscriptions/attention; opening the destination does not resolve or dismiss any issue.
Rollout status
The attention state/API and alert dispatcher are separate rollout controls. Alert dispatch defaults to off, and the server migration must be applied in each deployed environment before the feature can be enabled there. Seeing the alert preference does not mean alert dispatch is active. This guide does not indicate that a production rollout or deployment has completed.
This feature does not automatically follow a renamed Instagram handle, change a subscription target, send email alerts, or add an attention-management screen to the Obsidian plugin or share web app.
Obsidian Desktop Plugin
The Obsidian plugin remains the best place for vault-oriented subscription management and legacy desktop workflows:
- View subscribed authors and run history
- Delete or pause subscriptions
- Manually run supported subscriptions when your account has entitlement
- Sync subscription-created archives into your vault
- Use local/plugin-specific flows that depend on desktop context, such as some cookie-backed or local-fetch integrations
Because subscriptions now require Premium, the plugin shows a notice when a new subscription, resume, or run action requires entitlement. Existing subscriptions are not removed automatically.
Deduplication
Subscriptions track already-seen content to avoid duplicates.
Each subscription can use:
- Post IDs from the platform or feed
- Content hashes built from text and media URLs
- Cursor state such as the last seen post ID or timestamp
When a run finds content already known to your account, Social Archiver skips it rather than creating another archive.
Profile Crawl vs Subscription
| Feature | Profile Crawl | Subscription |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | Manual | Automatic |
| Mobile support | Not supported | Supported for listed platforms |
| Best for | Backfilling existing posts | Capturing future posts |
| Run Now | Desktop/plugin workflow | Not available on mobile |
| Deduplication | Limited to the crawl job | Persistent post ID/hash tracking |
Use profile crawl in the Obsidian plugin when you need a one-time backfill. Use subscriptions when you want new public content to keep arriving automatically.
Next Steps
- Archive posts
- Use the mobile app
- View your archives in Timeline View