Spring cleaning & future groundwork
Here are a collection of nice-to-have updates for Serial. Plus, the groundwork for background refreshing and better financial sustainability for Serial.
April 02, 2026
Features
Background Refresh
- Background refresh is now available for self-hosted instances. This will automatically fetch new content for your feeds as it becomes available, instead of requiring you to wait on startup to fetch new content.
- This can be enabled with
BACKGROUND_REFRESH_ENABLED=truein your environment variables.
Feed activity
- Added the ability to disable/enable feeds. This allows you to keep feeds in your feed list, but prevent new content from being fetched (until turned back on)
Improvements
- Desktop actions now only appear on hover, giving more space to page content
- You can always show actions by setting “Inline Shortcuts” to “Show” in the Appearance settings, or by holding Alt to show all keyboard shortcuts.
Fixes
- Alt key now only shows shortcuts if it is the only key being held
- Item selection UI no longer shows on mobile, as it is not needed
- Fixed an issue where articles and videos were a bit jumpy on initial load
Future
- Adds groundwork for paid, main instance plans for Serial
- This is a work in progress – feel free to weigh in on GitHub or by reaching out to hey@serial.tube.