I still miss Google Reader. I loved the social aspects, where I could repost my favorite articles (with comments about them), and friends could easily subscribe to my feed and comment on my shares. It was a really great social network for sharing blog posts and articles. I credit the demise of Google Reader with a lot of the downfall of the Old Web.
Since then, social sharing platforms are motivated to keep you on their platform. I recently ran an experiment on Facebook, where I posted a link to a content creator's video on YouTube with a lot of my thoughts about it.
I then downloaded the same video from YouTube and uploaded it to Facebook (this particular creator didn't upload his content to Facebook directly), and posted the exact same text content (but this time, hid the link the the source video in a comment).
The post where I downloaded + reposted the video got about 1000x more views than the one where I linked to the source.
On top of that, Facebook will often hide the link to the source video unless I click "Show all comments" (rather than the default "Show most relevant").
Facebook deprioritizes (shadowbans?) posts that link off of their platform, and it starts feeling like a stagnant pond. It's frustrating that it's difficult to share insightful blog posts on that platform, and I'm feeling pretty done with it.
Getting a good RSS reader isn't the part that I'm looking for -- I want the easy social aspect that Google Reader and Google+ gave me.
Decentralized social RSS feed / article recommendations could totally happen if the community came up with a standard way to implement it.
Re-posting / paraphrasing a comment I made in a discussion about decentralized recommendation algorithms for RSS feed content:
People used to post a "blogroll" (and sometimes an OPML file) to their personal blogs showing the feeds they followed. That was one way to do decentralized recommendations, albeit manually since there was no well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files. If there was a well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files a client could build a recommendation graph.
OMPL files in well-known locations would be neat but would only provide feed-level recommendation. Article-level recommendation would be cooler.
One of the various federated/decentralized/whatever-Bluesky-is "modern" re-implementations of Twitter/NNTP could be used to drive article-level recommendations. My feed reader could emit machine-readable recommendation posts based on ratings I give while browsing articles. My feed reader could consume these recommendations from others, and then lots of fun could be had weighting recommendations based on social graph, algorithmic summary of the article body, trustworthiness of the poster, friend-of-friend status, etc.
I thought about some of this stuff back in '05 when I tried to contribute to ttrss. The maintainer didn't have much interest so I dropped it. I've thought about it periodically but never had the initiative to do anything with it.
Shameless plug but you might enjoy the site I've been working on for the past few years: lynkmi.com
It's very much inspired by the earlier web and more recently especially catalysed by the trend you note of the big sites punishing doors to elsewhere. I remember a time when Facebook actually had a "links" section where you could see a list of all the cool stuff you had posted, so it's sad they've strayed so far.
Join the resistance! Every tag and profile automatically has an RSS feed too, and I just recently added internal backlinks which I'm enjoying a lot.
> Facebook deprioritizes (shadowbans?) posts that link off of their platform
That tells you that's not what it's for. It would be like posting your resume on FB and LinkedIn and then pointing out that FB led to fewer job offers than LinkedIn. Different platforms, different purposes.
Have you tried Feedly or Inoreader or Flipboard or The Old Reader or any other RSS services that popped up after Google Reader was killed?
If you're in the Apple ecosystem (Mac, iPhone) NetNewsWire is an absolute delight. It's not a commercial product any more, Brent Simmons runs it as a (very serious) passion project. Here's a recent post by him explaining part of his philosophy for it: https://inessential.com/2025/10/04/why-netnewswire-is-not-we...
Crucially, it syncs feed read state between my laptop and phone.
> Crucially, it syncs feed read state between my laptop and phone.
This is via iCloud and only works for iPhones/Macs. What’s great though is that NetNewsWire also supports RSS feed aggregators (I personally use FreshRSS) so that you can sync RSS read status over all your devices, even non Apple ones!
I’ve been tempted over the years to switch to other RSS apps, but this feature is what keeps me using NetNewsWire.
It’s flawless. It just works. There are no gimmicks, there is no weird effort to gamify it into a social media play, it’s just a user-focused news reader. And that’s great.
In addition to sync by iCloud, you can also sync with a third-party aggregator (BazQux, Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader, NewsBlur, The Old Reader, or FreshRSS). This can be a good option if you sometimes need access from a non-Apple device.
I started out with NNW then went to Reeder when iPhone came out. Later on google shut down their endeavor and I became frustrated with all the *free* alternatives—luckily I stumbled across News Explorer which I believe was the first (or one of the first) to do iCloud syncing so I could ditch the middleman.
I suggested iCloud sync to Brent but was first rebuffed about the poor technical aspects and problems that it had. For those who remember the sentiment around that time was that iCloud sync was unreliable yet News Explorer was proof that it was working just fine.
Brent later backtracked for which I am very happy, I've been using NNW ever since.
I only wish it had RSS filtering to weed out the shitposts, I believe they're working on it. In the meantime I've been using Feed Rinse.
I use NetNewsWire as a frontend, and self-hosted FreshRSS as backend for sync and feed management. Works a treat across multiple devices, Mac/iOS/iPadOS and web.
I used NNW for a LONG LONG TIME. It's great software.
There was a period when it was not as useful, though, and I migrated away, but I still think of it very fondly.
My current RSS consumption toolchain uses Feedbin as the back end / syncing host, and their web app is good enough that I no longer use a native tool on my Mac. On my phone and iPad I use Reeder.
NNW got me paying for my first RSS client. Reeder got me while it was semi-retired. I still have NNW installed just for nostalgia. Both are great and a solid RSS client is one of the first three apps I'd install on any / every device.
It currently only runs in Firefox but if anyone is interested, I'll Port it to Chrome since it now supports a sidebar interface.
I made this because I wanted to have feeds show up where I read them, in the browser, and I wanted it on my own device so nobody else controls it. No hosting, no payment, just a simple tool that lets me control what I read.
Bonus: if you try it you'll likely increase the global usage by double digits ;)
Interested. I miss when Firefox sorted in natively, even if it was bare minimum. I've been looking for a lightweight RSS reader for desktop. I'd probably ditch my mobile app too if this was compatible with Firefox mobile.
This is a nice overview but is also obviously content marketing for Lighthouse, which, fine.
I use Feedly, and generally like it, but the issue with RSS has very little to do with reader front ends and largely to do with how a lot of people don't publish full articles on RSS, images don't work, etc. The demo images of all the readers are like best case scenario - most non-personal sites only publish a paragraph or two, if that, making the reader more of a link aggregator.
I use feedly because it's where I landed after GReader; I don't love it, but it has worked continually without bothering me enough to think about it.
But one day I want to look into alternatives, and the number one thing in my wishlist is to be able to scrap sites that crop the full article in the feed. Going from the RSS client to the browser to the reader mode in the browser is such an absurd friction.
Edit: Well, after 12 years, that day ended up being today. I found a client called FeedMe that syncs with Feedly and can load the full article inside the client. It also has some other features that I was looking for, like filters. There might be more clients like that, but this is the first I found. I shouldn't have been so lazy all this time.
FreshRSS supports CSS selectors and others to get the full content.
I've also built a bunch of RSS feed hydrators myself where the process of getting content to the feed isn't as simple as "grab that bit of the page".
Like my HN feed uses Opengraph information from the linked article to fill in a picture and preview as well as the Algolia HN api to get scores and comment counts.
Although I've been an Inoreader user over the last few years, this year I switched to Miniflux. I felt like features/cost ratio for Inoreader finally tipped away from what I was interested in paying. Migrating to Miniflux was genuinely very easy-- spin up the docker compose, export OPML from Inoreader, import OPML to Miniflux. I use tsdproxy and tailscale funnels to get access to the web endpoint.
While I started out just using the webapp, I quickly discovered that there large number of Miniflux compatible applications. I eventually settled on:
One neat thing about Miniflux is that it supports a number of APIs, including Fever and Google Reader. As long as your frontend works with one of these, you get a seamless experience. This level of choice is actually something I'm really enjoying-- I get a very native experience on whatever platform I use, as opposed to using the Inoreader app/website on each platform.
I was wondering why Tiny Tiny RSS was missing as that's what I've been using for the last 10+ years. At the bottom of the article there's the explanation:
> On October 3rd the maintainer announced that he's going to stop working on it, and will remove all infrastructure on November 1st. Forks of the project with other maintainers may pop up, but at the moment it's too soon to tell what the future of Tiny Tiny RSS will be.
The person who forked it (https://github.com/tt-rss/tt-rss) was very active on the original Tiny Tiny RSS development side as well as on the forums. I have a good feeling that this fork will work out just fine.
I have tried most of the RSS on the market, and for last three years i'm staying on BazQux.
I try to read everything on the internet via my reader so it is important to me that it:
1. can discover not so obvious feeds like youtube or reddit
2. makes rss feeds for non rss services — in the past it had feeds for twitter, vk and instagram that didn't provide feed. Sadly this is no longer a thing I beleive as such thing as social media public api dissappeared
3. can retreive full text of article
That said I believe you need to think of choosing of RSS reader as about choosing a mighty backend for the feeds. There is nothing difficult in rendering nice text from XML. Real difficulty is in making RSS avaliable on sites that are hostile to RSS (and will became more hostile in future).
And for the chosen backend, you can choose any frontend — just look at RSS apps in app store for your platform. Most of them will support using other backends. Reeder for Apple devices is nice.
Newsboat + miniflux is an excellent combination if you're CLI-addicted but want to access feeds from multiple devices.
For all the (justifiable) concern about the death of RSS, we have a glut of excellent options for consuming content through RSS. But I'm still sour about the Reeder redesign. At least the dev was transparent about building the tool he wanted to use but, ugh, it's barely in the same market as the others now.
I've been using newsboat for years. I've thought about trying out miniflux for a while, but a few days ago I got a different idea.
First, the newsboat DB is SQLlite so it's easy to access. I wrote a few scripts that built static HTML pages of all of the feeds along with a feed style page. I copied the HN page html/CSS, which to me feels like the maximum compact view while still being readable.
Now I have a bash script that will refresh all of the newsboat feeds and then open the static HTML page in the default web browser.
Thinking a lot about the impact of "vibe" coding recently made me wonder why anyone needs to be locked in to not just a set UI but any sort of rigid external control of how the user sees and interacts with information.
I want to see all my news chronologically. Now in a single place I have hn, lobste.rs, numerous twitter/x feeds, mastodon, and a lot of other blogs all visible chronologically. If someone was noisy I could apply keyword filters to the feeds and block certain things out. If I wanted to, I could put this on a server and access it through my phone.
This was definitely "the easy" way to do this. You could raise $1 million and do the same thing the hard way.
They also have a free tier for the hosted version that is pretty generous (64 sites). I used the free hosted version for years after Reader went away and only upgraded as a way to support software that I use and enjoy regularly.
I wanted to have a list of latest posts of blogs I follow and that I can access it quickly from both PC and mobile phone without any signing in. Then I decided to do it myself like that.
There is a github workflow that runs automatically every 6 hours and updates that page.
I opened your page. 5 posts by Simon Willison and 8 by other authors. A comment by Simon Willison underneath this comment as well (now the top comment on the thread).
Simon's spam game is CRAZY. There's a million blogs out there but over half of the posts on your reader are him. Why bother? You can't get away from him here or on lobsters even if you want to -- why further flood your subscriptions with his slop?
I don't understand how he has such a grip on you people. The Andrew Tate of AI bros.
Yes, like 95% of commenters here, I also have an RSS reader. Mine is kinda social (you can follow people and see their subscriptions in your feed), and also has full-text search and “related” recommendations. I also curate and grow a directory of human-written personal blogs: https://minifeed.net
Due to the nature of the medium, the majority of blogs in the directory and technical.
This is cool — I love it-- the layout and list of the people.
Your OMPL list is awesome. I am also working in a similar direction. Right now, I am following only a few people in my RSS feed, so your list is really helpful.
A bit of a self-promotion, but relevant. I've been working on a TUI feed reader that stores all articles locally in Markdown in a filesystem structure, similar to what Obsidian does, if anyone's interested: https://github.com/CrociDB/bulletty
Going to shill for Feedbin (https://feedbin.com). I switched to this in 2012 when Reader blew up and it has remained a consistently excellent product since then.
I use the web client, and on iOS I use Reeder app to access Feedbin. Ben even published the a Feedbin API¹, which I wrote a Feedbin client for vintage computers (I called Mosaicbin)². I even use it for YouTube subs as of this year and it ingests them perfectly (and can filter Shorts).
I'm still on the original pricing but would happily pay $5/mo current price if it came to that. It's a product that would leave a huge void in my life if it ever disappeared.
I joined later than you: May 2013. If it really was 2012 when Google Reader blew up, I can't remember what I used before finding Feedbin. Maybe Feedly, maybe something else that came and went or maybe even a local reader...
For Android users, I recommend "Capy Reader" as a client.
I’ll add https://github.com/stringer-rss/stringer to the self-hosted list. It is my reader of choice since I think over ten years. Never had the feeling of looking for another one.
I stopped all social media a while ago. Unless you consider hackernews, reddit, etc. social media. I always considered these news aggregators/forums as different but I digress.
I recently wondered how my perspective would change if I cut that out too. Would my understand of "what really happened" change? Would my worldview change? I already find myself disagreeing with "my" groups fairly frequently but still, I wonder what different conclusions I would come to if I just consumed the primary sources. Of course the source will matter ideally I could read a wide variety of sources on the same story.
For some reason I never thought about RSS. But its the perfect tool for the job.
It does raise a question if there's such a thing as a "minimum effective dose" of news consumption, and diminishing returns at certain thresholds of consumption. For instance, is one RSS feed with NYT headlines perhaps comprehensive enough that it is 90% functionally equivalent to a more voracious habit of reading diverse sources, subject matter expert blogs and so on?
I bit of out-topic, but the best recommendation that I had here in HN was definitely the FreshRSS [1].
Yes, the design sounds _phpish_, but on Docker it's so reliable and fast, that I feel that I am in some sort of "final version of the software" and not needing anything else or enhancements, like WinRar, Notepad.exe, Winamp, Nero Burning ROM, Windows XP, etc.
I do not know if others have the same feeling about a software that works so great, that _any_ update will be a downgrade given the high level of contentment and satisfaction.
I can second the recommendation for FreshRSS- it's incredibly utilitarian and I have no complaints. I've been using it for about 4 years. It's how I came to this thread!
Couldn't agree more about the "final version" sentiment: my self hosted instance sat there for the first two years, untouched, working flawlessly and used daily. It's only when I switched server hardware that I actually performed an upgrade to the latest version, pleasantly surprised to find that there were no major changes (minor QoL patches only) and everything just worked.
I’m disappointed in the article but watching RSS for 25 years (declared dead for most of them) have gotten me used to disappointment. It just seems like every discussion about RSS starts as if it was some brand new thing and not if we didn’t have 25 years of experience with it.
The article makes a matrix out of the least important attributes of the product (free vs hosted) and has nothing at all to say about: (1) user interface and (2) architecture.
(2) of course puts constraints on (1) but gets you to the heart of the RSS predicament. It is possible in principle for an RSS reader to be completely stateless, that is you could make an HTML page with some JavaScript in it that reads an OPML file and then hits all those RSS feeds and formats them somehow. Or you could write some scripts that do the same with curl. [1]
The stateful system has a lot of advantages, particularly that the state never gets corrupted because it doesn’t exist. If you could add some simple and reliable layer that dealt with the worst of the polling problems with a cache then you could still stay pretty simple.
Past that though the architecture could get complex pretty quick in that you may want to reify feed items and store them in a database, keep track of whether you read something or not, run queries against the feed, run a recommender against the feed, etc.
[1] … if your cache mechanisms will protect you from polling some people’s RSS feeds too fast. Maybe you’re better off if they block you.
If it hasn't already been mentioned huge fan of newsboat paired with Lynx in the terminal. Travels easily and with lynx browser kinda brings me back to a more focused reading experience.
Claude Code built me a custom RSS feed reader in just an hour or so. I wanted a simple list of unread posts, which would be auto-deleted when I clicked on them to read them. It took less than 24 hours to go from "ok I'll try to make this" to having it up and running "in production" on my home server.
AI could be a real game changer for anyone who runs their own server or homelab. If you can't find a reader you like, just make one! It's not that hard these days.
Anybody know of a self-hosted RSS reader that can remember different views for different folders?
I'm using Inoreader which does that - I have a folder that is displayed as titles only, and a different one that displays as "cards".
I've tried a few of the more famous self-hosted ones, but none of them have that feature. I know that a keyboard shortcut can be used to change views, but my early-morning doomscrolling brain doesn't want to think about that.
I've been enjoying TT-RSS, though I do miss when the mobile app companion for it actually worked well. The web interface does work fine, and it does integrate with other local readers (such as newsboat), and allows for a centralized database so that I'm not stuck filtering what I've read on my desktop vs what I've read on my phone.
I used Feeder on my Android phone for the longest time. Recently set up a NixOS server and enabled FreshRSS on it, with FocusReader as the Android client. It is very nice to manage feeds on a server and have the read/unread status sync across devices.
If you have only used device-local readers before and have a server to spare, I recommend at least trying it!
I have freshrss on a VPS and use the web interface as my client on computers and my phone. Is FocusReader a big upgrade over the native web experience?
One of the "I wish I'd paid for premium sooner" services I use is Newsblur. The UI is not the most modern, but it centralizes, organizes, offlines, etc with enough power features to handle edge cases that I can feel like I "read everything today" the way I used to with Google Reader.
Big fan of https://github.com/synzen/MonitoRSS, not mentioned in the article. I self host at home and it sends feed updates to my own Discord server. I appreciate the customization for how the feed notification appear in Discord.
After about a decade of experimentation (NetNewsWire, Feedbin, Miniflux...), I'm self-hosting a feed reader I wrote myself, running on a free hosted LibSQL db.
- NetNewsWire was slick, but wouldn't work on my phone.
- Feedbin was excellent, but eventually I decided to do some subscription cost-cutting.
- Miniflux worked fine, but 1) I found it a pain to set up with remote hosted Postgres and 2) it burned through the Neon free-tier usage limits in a couple days.
So I built one myself and run it on a Raspberry Pi home server.
Made a great little weekend project. The feed standards are known quantities, so a little AI assistance with boilerplate goes a long way.
Deciding you need a new feature and just adding it is refreshing — e.g. I wanted a "read it later" feature like Feedbin's (something missing from Miniflux), and now I have it.
I've been a big fan of Iconfactory's Tapestry for a while now. It supports RSS, plus a bunch of custom connectors for non-RSS things. You could write your own to pull down whatever random thing you wanted, like GitHub Actions outputs or screenshots of your home webcam.
Last update was 4 years ago; I don't know if this means the project is dead or merely "done." One of the last features added was the ability to share a news item to Hacker News:
Self plug: I wanted to have RSS feeds on my browser new tab page along with other widgets, and there weren't that many great options for what I wanted out of a new tab page; so i created my own! https://newtabwidgets.com.
I find the new tab page to be the ideal location for RSS feeds as I can quickly see new updates each time I open a new tab (which is quite frequently!).
I doubt this actually exists, but does anyone know of an RSS reader that is cross platform, open source, and can sync between multiple devices via syncthing?
I already sync notes, e-books, etc, via syncthing on Android and Linux. RSS is one place where I have yet to find an option.
I recently enabled RSS for my own blog¹ and found it very frustrating getting the images/thumbs to display properly. The reason it was frustrating is the aggressive caching by the RSS readers. I had to debug it on a bunch of different readers, then once it was finally working change the URL of my feed to force them all to refresh.
The RSS feeds are surprisingly non-standardized for the media content extensions, even a simple thumbnail.
I've found RSS Guard a few months ago, and it has finally replaced the gap that existed since Google Reader. It's cross-platform, which is a nice bonus, it works like a classic Windows program, which is a great plus because the modern RSS readers have a terrible UX because right click doesn't work, shortcuts don't work, etc.
The only thing I miss is that I want it to keep an OPML file up-to-date so I can autosync it to a repo, but it doesn't, so I have to export the OPML file sporadically. It's acceptable.
I was looking into this a few days ago, but was having a hard time finding an RSS reader that was desktop software and handled Youtube feeds. I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t tied to a SaaS or required hosting online.
I believe yarr fills all your requirements. Can run as standalone on linux, and if you click "read here" the video gets embed. Assuming an extra click is not disqualifying. Note I have not verified this because I host it on a VPS.
What readers have you tried? What do you mean by "handled YouTube feeds". YouTube feeds just work as far as I am aware, they are fairly regular feeds. Are you expecting something in particular?
My 2¢: Feedly's free plan is great and their web UI awesome. The features I want from the pro plan do not warrant the price.
I've switched to using Feedbin. I don't mind paying for it even though I could keep using Feedly for free, but the web UI ads annoyed me enough to look elsewhere.
The best Apple app is easily Unread, both for UI and UX. It still is t perfect for me, but the problems are minor and the author pleasant to interact with.
The author of Reeder has another RSS app that’s focused on recipes called Mela [1]. I’ve been using Reeder (the one-time payment version) and Mela for years and highly recommend both.
The author says they only found one browser extension that was a feedreader, that is not the case. So I'm posting here in case anyone else is looking for that type of solution.
I've been using Docker containers for RSS Bridge and FreshRSS on my local machine, which has been a game changer, particularly with regards to following certain TikTok creators via RSS, meaning I can ignore the algorithm altogether. I wish it were more stable, however, the TikTok feeds can break from time to time...
If you are in the Apple ecosystem I recommend News Explorer. It has a very nice interface and it syncs with your iCloud. It is a one-time payment of $4.99.
I've been using Feedbin basically since Google Reader died. There are many feedbin compatible clients.
I'd probably honestly like to move to something self-hosted, but afaik there is no way to export the read status of individual feed items. OPML is just a list of feeds and their URLs, not their individual item history.
I use Reeder Classic on Mac and iOS, synced via Feedly. I also use the Feedly app on Android and the web app on Windows, but this article made me discover folo.is, which could probably unify my experience across all these platforms. I’ll give it a try.
Article feels AI generated and misses some big ones. Given that this is advertising for their product, I don’t feel like this is actually useful (meaning unbiased and comprehensive) content for anyone who wants to figure out what RSS reader fits their needs.
Ha! I started with CHV, then moved to Bloglines, then to Google Reader, then to NewsBlur, then to TT-RSS, then to Feedly, then to Inoreader, where I've stayed since 2016. I get an itch every time one of these RSS discussions happens, but it passes.
I use the old Reeder still (don’t care for the new one at all, it’s pretty crappy and the subscription has zero value for me), and NetNewsWire is still not as slick on iOS, but the piece is largely on point.
Also on the old Reeder (v5), with a local FreshRSS as the back-end. It's fantastic on Mac, iOS and iPadOS, and I have no desire to move to the new Reeder or any alternative.
Keeps my feeds in sync between the mobile app and the web site, has pretty good keyboard shortcuts, mostly just gets out of the way, doesn't have ads
I'm not sure what else I'd need
a RSS reader should allow for quick view of titles & summaries so you can decide to click through or not, inoreader free version scratches that itch. Don't need any fancy features, or social stuff. sure it's not self hosted, but it's just a collection of rss feeds, if it's down for a while, nothing big of value was lost, a small ompl backup of the feeds is all you need to get started elsewhere, self hosted or not.
i have been using this for 20 years already. by now my own version has accumulated a few custom patches. but the original it is still under active development/support.
some day i need to submit my changes upstream.
I have my own custom perl script which basically does the same which I've been using for probably a similar amount of time. Never used a dedicated RSS reader. My feeds just get turned into email and dropped into the appropriate folder thanks to my sieve filters. Can read/delete things from any of my email clients. Absolutely no need for a dedicated RSS reader.
I pay for both Feedly and Inoreader. I can't seem to break away from Feedly's multi-inner-tab reading features, but I like Inoreader's tagging/sorting.
Some very important criteria, more than the hosting itself, is if the feeds can be accessed from multiple devices (desktop, mobile, tablet, commandline?, ...)
No wonder they did everything they could to hide RSS from the masses: it's such a shame that users control their own feeds rather than their obscure algorithms.
This is what I'm using right now. I like that it has a built-in "reader mode" where it fetches the target article from the website and removes all the crud.
But I do have a wishlist of creature-comfort items that would probably never make it in:
* I go days/weeks without reading anything and trying to find out where I left off is a big pain. There doesn't seem to be a way to sort chonologicaly (only reverse).
* The only difference between read/unread items is a tiny gray dot in front of the article title. (I'd rather have the unread items stand out more from the read ones, with a different background, bold text, etc.)
* It would be nice to have a per-feed setting of whether to show the article as it appears in the RSS feed, or go fetch it from the web in reader mode.
happy freshrss user here, the mobile web interface is a bit annoying, readera is fine. but it's so fast compared to use other things... (hosted on a old rpi3)
> Their main purpose is enabling their users to consume content
Here we go again... no, "consume content" is what the commercial social networks want you to do so you stick around until the next ad break. (Maybe even what a commercial SaaS RSS reader wants you to do so you pay the next bill.)
I use RSS specifically to get away from generic "content". Instead I read to learn things, and to explore opoinions I might not otherwise come in contact with, and to socialise with other people.
It bugs me too when actual humans adopt soulless management-speak about "content" traveling from "producer" to "consumer." (The words don't even make sense: when you consume food, it's gone; when you observe text, an image, or video, it's still there.) I use RSS to keep up with other people who "emit content" at irregular intervals.
Feedly's bullshit about AI and enterprise "insights" is incredibly irritating. Like, I read articles about cooking and math. Why would I want AI-powered security insights? Why would anyone want them, for that matter? It seems incredibly... clueless.
>Like, I read articles about cooking and math. Why would I want AI-powered security insights? Why would anyone want them, for that matter?
It's government's social program.
Most people are so ignorant about digital security that governments force media providers (social media, newspapers, bloggers) to make native content about how to not tell your bank password to a random person on the internet.
Isn't this just marketing AI slop? There is no real structure, several readers are described with more details, others aren't. At the end there is an ad for Lighthouse.
Many links shared on HN are content marketing for various companies. In this case it's a good start for a discussion and sharing RSS tool that are not listed on that list.
HanClinto|4 months ago
Since then, social sharing platforms are motivated to keep you on their platform. I recently ran an experiment on Facebook, where I posted a link to a content creator's video on YouTube with a lot of my thoughts about it.
I then downloaded the same video from YouTube and uploaded it to Facebook (this particular creator didn't upload his content to Facebook directly), and posted the exact same text content (but this time, hid the link the the source video in a comment).
The post where I downloaded + reposted the video got about 1000x more views than the one where I linked to the source.
On top of that, Facebook will often hide the link to the source video unless I click "Show all comments" (rather than the default "Show most relevant").
Facebook deprioritizes (shadowbans?) posts that link off of their platform, and it starts feeling like a stagnant pond. It's frustrating that it's difficult to share insightful blog posts on that platform, and I'm feeling pretty done with it.
Getting a good RSS reader isn't the part that I'm looking for -- I want the easy social aspect that Google Reader and Google+ gave me.
EvanAnderson|4 months ago
Re-posting / paraphrasing a comment I made in a discussion about decentralized recommendation algorithms for RSS feed content:
People used to post a "blogroll" (and sometimes an OPML file) to their personal blogs showing the feeds they followed. That was one way to do decentralized recommendations, albeit manually since there was no well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files. If there was a well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files a client could build a recommendation graph.
OMPL files in well-known locations would be neat but would only provide feed-level recommendation. Article-level recommendation would be cooler.
One of the various federated/decentralized/whatever-Bluesky-is "modern" re-implementations of Twitter/NNTP could be used to drive article-level recommendations. My feed reader could emit machine-readable recommendation posts based on ratings I give while browsing articles. My feed reader could consume these recommendations from others, and then lots of fun could be had weighting recommendations based on social graph, algorithmic summary of the article body, trustworthiness of the poster, friend-of-friend status, etc.
I thought about some of this stuff back in '05 when I tried to contribute to ttrss. The maintainer didn't have much interest so I dropped it. I've thought about it periodically but never had the initiative to do anything with it.
OisinMoran|4 months ago
It's very much inspired by the earlier web and more recently especially catalysed by the trend you note of the big sites punishing doors to elsewhere. I remember a time when Facebook actually had a "links" section where you could see a list of all the cool stuff you had posted, so it's sad they've strayed so far.
Join the resistance! Every tag and profile automatically has an RSS feed too, and I just recently added internal backlinks which I'm enjoying a lot.
swyx|4 months ago
maybe you have causation wrong. social platforms were so effective they caused downfall of old web, and with it the demise of Google Reader
riddley|4 months ago
cosmotic|4 months ago
asdff|4 months ago
not--felix|4 months ago
criddell|4 months ago
That tells you that's not what it's for. It would be like posting your resume on FB and LinkedIn and then pointing out that FB led to fewer job offers than LinkedIn. Different platforms, different purposes.
Have you tried Feedly or Inoreader or Flipboard or The Old Reader or any other RSS services that popped up after Google Reader was killed?
simonw|4 months ago
Crucially, it syncs feed read state between my laptop and phone.
JLO64|4 months ago
This is via iCloud and only works for iPhones/Macs. What’s great though is that NetNewsWire also supports RSS feed aggregators (I personally use FreshRSS) so that you can sync RSS read status over all your devices, even non Apple ones!
I’ve been tempted over the years to switch to other RSS apps, but this feature is what keeps me using NetNewsWire.
perardi|4 months ago
Really.
It’s flawless. It just works. There are no gimmicks, there is no weird effort to gamify it into a social media play, it’s just a user-focused news reader. And that’s great.
divbzero|4 months ago
In addition to sync by iCloud, you can also sync with a third-party aggregator (BazQux, Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader, NewsBlur, The Old Reader, or FreshRSS). This can be a good option if you sometimes need access from a non-Apple device.
nntwozz|4 months ago
I suggested iCloud sync to Brent but was first rebuffed about the poor technical aspects and problems that it had. For those who remember the sentiment around that time was that iCloud sync was unreliable yet News Explorer was proof that it was working just fine.
Brent later backtracked for which I am very happy, I've been using NNW ever since.
I only wish it had RSS filtering to weed out the shitposts, I believe they're working on it. In the meantime I've been using Feed Rinse.
http://www.feedrinse.com/index-old.php
olex|4 months ago
ubermonkey|4 months ago
There was a period when it was not as useful, though, and I migrated away, but I still think of it very fondly.
My current RSS consumption toolchain uses Feedbin as the back end / syncing host, and their web app is good enough that I no longer use a native tool on my Mac. On my phone and iPad I use Reeder.
alsetmusic|4 months ago
theshrike79|4 months ago
Works perfectly with a self-hosted FreshRSS backend.
reddalo|4 months ago
netghost|4 months ago
It currently only runs in Firefox but if anyone is interested, I'll Port it to Chrome since it now supports a sidebar interface.
I made this because I wanted to have feeds show up where I read them, in the browser, and I wanted it on my own device so nobody else controls it. No hosting, no payment, just a simple tool that lets me control what I read.
Bonus: if you try it you'll likely increase the global usage by double digits ;)
hn-ifs|4 months ago
mmsc|4 months ago
xeonmc|4 months ago
jrochkind1|4 months ago
theshrike79|4 months ago
And follow the best practices: https://rachelbythebay.com/fs/help.html
Basically you don't want to hammer the server every minute or even every day if the feed updates once a week. Use ETags and Last-Modified properly.
kkukshtel|4 months ago
I use Feedly, and generally like it, but the issue with RSS has very little to do with reader front ends and largely to do with how a lot of people don't publish full articles on RSS, images don't work, etc. The demo images of all the readers are like best case scenario - most non-personal sites only publish a paragraph or two, if that, making the reader more of a link aggregator.
Unai|4 months ago
But one day I want to look into alternatives, and the number one thing in my wishlist is to be able to scrap sites that crop the full article in the feed. Going from the RSS client to the browser to the reader mode in the browser is such an absurd friction.
Edit: Well, after 12 years, that day ended up being today. I found a client called FeedMe that syncs with Feedly and can load the full article inside the client. It also has some other features that I was looking for, like filters. There might be more clients like that, but this is the first I found. I shouldn't have been so lazy all this time.
theshrike79|4 months ago
I've also built a bunch of RSS feed hydrators myself where the process of getting content to the feed isn't as simple as "grab that bit of the page".
Like my HN feed uses Opengraph information from the linked article to fill in a picture and preview as well as the Algolia HN api to get scores and comment counts.
eviks|4 months ago
That's exactly what some of the front ends help resolve - they parse the link to get the full content, some even for sites requiring login.
mnmalst|4 months ago
dhruvmittal|4 months ago
While I started out just using the webapp, I quickly discovered that there large number of Miniflux compatible applications. I eventually settled on:
- Read You on my Android Phone and Tablet https://github.com/ReadYouApp/ReadYou
- Reactflux (web) on my windows laptop https://github.com/electh/ReactFlux
- RSSGuard on my linux desktop https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard
- Reeder classic on iPad (I already owned this, might as well keep using it)
- PoweReader on my work iPhone https://powereader.app/
One neat thing about Miniflux is that it supports a number of APIs, including Fever and Google Reader. As long as your frontend works with one of these, you get a seamless experience. This level of choice is actually something I'm really enjoying-- I get a very native experience on whatever platform I use, as opposed to using the Inoreader app/website on each platform.
xukecheng|4 months ago
askl|4 months ago
> On October 3rd the maintainer announced that he's going to stop working on it, and will remove all infrastructure on November 1st. Forks of the project with other maintainers may pop up, but at the moment it's too soon to tell what the future of Tiny Tiny RSS will be.
ChrisArchitect|4 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45466224
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45468320
moontear|4 months ago
dugite-code|4 months ago
al_borland|4 months ago
https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/T...
brachkow|4 months ago
I try to read everything on the internet via my reader so it is important to me that it:
1. can discover not so obvious feeds like youtube or reddit 2. makes rss feeds for non rss services — in the past it had feeds for twitter, vk and instagram that didn't provide feed. Sadly this is no longer a thing I beleive as such thing as social media public api dissappeared 3. can retreive full text of article
That said I believe you need to think of choosing of RSS reader as about choosing a mighty backend for the feeds. There is nothing difficult in rendering nice text from XML. Real difficulty is in making RSS avaliable on sites that are hostile to RSS (and will became more hostile in future).
And for the chosen backend, you can choose any frontend — just look at RSS apps in app store for your platform. Most of them will support using other backends. Reeder for Apple devices is nice.
renegat0x0|4 months ago
https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS
https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds
My problem with most RSS do not have great search. With 500+ sources this can become problem.
https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - my own project
yakattak|4 months ago
6510|4 months ago
flkiwi|4 months ago
For all the (justifiable) concern about the death of RSS, we have a glut of excellent options for consuming content through RSS. But I'm still sour about the Reeder redesign. At least the dev was transparent about building the tool he wanted to use but, ugh, it's barely in the same market as the others now.
AJ007|4 months ago
First, the newsboat DB is SQLlite so it's easy to access. I wrote a few scripts that built static HTML pages of all of the feeds along with a feed style page. I copied the HN page html/CSS, which to me feels like the maximum compact view while still being readable.
Now I have a bash script that will refresh all of the newsboat feeds and then open the static HTML page in the default web browser.
Thinking a lot about the impact of "vibe" coding recently made me wonder why anyone needs to be locked in to not just a set UI but any sort of rigid external control of how the user sees and interacts with information.
I want to see all my news chronologically. Now in a single place I have hn, lobste.rs, numerous twitter/x feeds, mastodon, and a lot of other blogs all visible chronologically. If someone was noisy I could apply keyword filters to the feeds and block certain things out. If I wanted to, I could put this on a server and access it through my phone.
This was definitely "the easy" way to do this. You could raise $1 million and do the same thing the hard way.
theshrike79|4 months ago
dpcx|4 months ago
sumeno|4 months ago
benrutter|4 months ago
I absolutely love Vore (the rss reader, not the other thing!!!) It's really simplistic, and beautifully refuses to do anything I don't want it to.
https://vore.website/
j3s|4 months ago
for the people who find the name unpalatable, i might come up with a safe-for-work url that directs to the same instance.
jurakovic|4 months ago
I wanted to have a list of latest posts of blogs I follow and that I can access it quickly from both PC and mobile phone without any signing in. Then I decided to do it myself like that. There is a github workflow that runs automatically every 6 hours and updates that page.
dingnuts|4 months ago
Simon's spam game is CRAZY. There's a million blogs out there but over half of the posts on your reader are him. Why bother? You can't get away from him here or on lobsters even if you want to -- why further flood your subscriptions with his slop?
I don't understand how he has such a grip on you people. The Andrew Tate of AI bros.
kubihubi|4 months ago
Would be cool if lawnchair for android could integrate RSS as news feed..
freetonik|4 months ago
Due to the nature of the medium, the majority of blogs in the directory and technical.
aalukabi|4 months ago
qudat|4 months ago
Check it out
squirrellous|4 months ago
CrociDB|4 months ago
jonpurdy|4 months ago
I use the web client, and on iOS I use Reeder app to access Feedbin. Ben even published the a Feedbin API¹, which I wrote a Feedbin client for vintage computers (I called Mosaicbin)². I even use it for YouTube subs as of this year and it ingests them perfectly (and can filter Shorts).
I'm still on the original pricing but would happily pay $5/mo current price if it came to that. It's a product that would leave a huge void in my life if it ever disappeared.
¹ - https://github.com/feedbin/feedbin-api
² - https://github.com/jonpurdy/mosaicbin
sjs382|4 months ago
I joined later than you: May 2013. If it really was 2012 when Google Reader blew up, I can't remember what I used before finding Feedbin. Maybe Feedly, maybe something else that came and went or maybe even a local reader...
For Android users, I recommend "Capy Reader" as a client.
ubermonkey|4 months ago
I also use Reeder on iOS but am happy with the Feedbin web app on my Mac.
Feedbin is a service I'm 100% happy to pay for.
jklinger410|4 months ago
So my real question is what is the value of Lighthouse compared to Feedly or Inoreader?
contradictioned|4 months ago
swanson|4 months ago
nonethewiser|4 months ago
I recently wondered how my perspective would change if I cut that out too. Would my understand of "what really happened" change? Would my worldview change? I already find myself disagreeing with "my" groups fairly frequently but still, I wonder what different conclusions I would come to if I just consumed the primary sources. Of course the source will matter ideally I could read a wide variety of sources on the same story.
For some reason I never thought about RSS. But its the perfect tool for the job.
glenstein|4 months ago
braza|4 months ago
Yes, the design sounds _phpish_, but on Docker it's so reliable and fast, that I feel that I am in some sort of "final version of the software" and not needing anything else or enhancements, like WinRar, Notepad.exe, Winamp, Nero Burning ROM, Windows XP, etc.
I do not know if others have the same feeling about a software that works so great, that _any_ update will be a downgrade given the high level of contentment and satisfaction.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18097105
solaire_oa|4 months ago
Couldn't agree more about the "final version" sentiment: my self hosted instance sat there for the first two years, untouched, working flawlessly and used daily. It's only when I switched server hardware that I actually performed an upgrade to the latest version, pleasantly surprised to find that there were no major changes (minor QoL patches only) and everything just worked.
DavideNL|4 months ago
PaulHoule|4 months ago
The article makes a matrix out of the least important attributes of the product (free vs hosted) and has nothing at all to say about: (1) user interface and (2) architecture.
(2) of course puts constraints on (1) but gets you to the heart of the RSS predicament. It is possible in principle for an RSS reader to be completely stateless, that is you could make an HTML page with some JavaScript in it that reads an OPML file and then hits all those RSS feeds and formats them somehow. Or you could write some scripts that do the same with curl. [1]
The stateful system has a lot of advantages, particularly that the state never gets corrupted because it doesn’t exist. If you could add some simple and reliable layer that dealt with the worst of the polling problems with a cache then you could still stay pretty simple.
Past that though the architecture could get complex pretty quick in that you may want to reify feed items and store them in a database, keep track of whether you read something or not, run queries against the feed, run a recommender against the feed, etc.
[1] … if your cache mechanisms will protect you from polling some people’s RSS feeds too fast. Maybe you’re better off if they block you.
CGamesPlay|4 months ago
They do, just use `--etag-save` and `--etag-compare` and curl does proper caching, since 2020: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2019/12/06/curl-speaks-etag/
I have dabbled with replacing my RSS reader with something like this, but haven't done it, yet.
netule|4 months ago
oogabooga13|4 months ago
npilk|4 months ago
AI could be a real game changer for anyone who runs their own server or homelab. If you can't find a reader you like, just make one! It's not that hard these days.
kirenida|4 months ago
I'm using Inoreader which does that - I have a folder that is displayed as titles only, and a different one that displays as "cards".
I've tried a few of the more famous self-hosted ones, but none of them have that feature. I know that a keyboard shortcut can be used to change views, but my early-morning doomscrolling brain doesn't want to think about that.
yomismoaqui|4 months ago
I've been using it since then without paying anything and it works ok.
wpollock|4 months ago
https://github.com/FredJul/Flym
cykros|4 months ago
kqr|4 months ago
If you have only used device-local readers before and have a server to spare, I recommend at least trying it!
acidburnNSA|4 months ago
verisimi|4 months ago
mzmzmzm|4 months ago
timbray|4 months ago
dotty-|4 months ago
lukasschwab|4 months ago
- NetNewsWire was slick, but wouldn't work on my phone.
- Feedbin was excellent, but eventually I decided to do some subscription cost-cutting.
- Miniflux worked fine, but 1) I found it a pain to set up with remote hosted Postgres and 2) it burned through the Neon free-tier usage limits in a couple days.
So I built one myself and run it on a Raspberry Pi home server.
Made a great little weekend project. The feed standards are known quantities, so a little AI assistance with boilerplate goes a long way.
Deciding you need a new feature and just adding it is refreshing — e.g. I wanted a "read it later" feature like Feedbin's (something missing from Miniflux), and now I have it.
kstrauser|4 months ago
mikece|4 months ago
https://github.com/QuiteRSS/quiterss
Last update was 4 years ago; I don't know if this means the project is dead or merely "done." One of the last features added was the ability to share a news item to Hacker News:
https://github.com/QuiteRSS/quiterss/issues/1084#issue-33248...
I have used this app on Windows and macOS; I've installed it on Linux but I don't do daily work on Linux so I don't know if it's stable there or not.
ajot|4 months ago
It seems he has already completed it? I'll try to migrate this weekend then https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard/issues/1707#issueco...
ctrlt|4 months ago
I find the new tab page to be the ideal location for RSS feeds as I can quickly see new updates each time I open a new tab (which is quite frequently!).
It's on the Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/new-tab-widgets/ejn...
__aru|4 months ago
I already sync notes, e-books, etc, via syncthing on Android and Linux. RSS is one place where I have yet to find an option.
jasonthorsness|4 months ago
The RSS feeds are surprisingly non-standardized for the media content extensions, even a simple thumbnail.
[1] https://www.jasonthorsness.com at https://www.jasonthorsness.com/rss.xml
righthand|4 months ago
NostraDavid|4 months ago
The only thing I miss is that I want it to keep an OPML file up-to-date so I can autosync it to a repo, but it doesn't, so I have to export the OPML file sporadically. It's acceptable.
righthand|4 months ago
semyonsh|4 months ago
pierrec|4 months ago
https://github.com/nkanaev/yarr
kevincox|4 months ago
unknown321|4 months ago
seba_dos1|4 months ago
jkmcf|4 months ago
I've switched to using Feedbin. I don't mind paying for it even though I could keep using Feedly for free, but the web UI ads annoyed me enough to look elsewhere.
The best Apple app is easily Unread, both for UI and UX. It still is t perfect for me, but the problems are minor and the author pleasant to interact with.
AndyMcConachie|4 months ago
heresie-dabord|4 months ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...
lanfeust6|4 months ago
davidcox143|4 months ago
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mela-recipe-manager/id15484660...
phreack|4 months ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/
soapdog|4 months ago
https://blogcat.org
The author says they only found one browser extension that was a feedreader, that is not the case. So I'm posting here in case anyone else is looking for that type of solution.
stranges|4 months ago
skinnymuch|4 months ago
curtisblaine|4 months ago
fuzzzerd|4 months ago
I've been using it for a few years and it's pretty great.
aboardRat4|4 months ago
javchz|4 months ago
2pie|4 months ago
galleywest200|4 months ago
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/news-explorer/id1032668306
pantulis|4 months ago
donatj|4 months ago
I'd probably honestly like to move to something self-hosted, but afaik there is no way to export the read status of individual feed items. OPML is just a list of feeds and their URLs, not their individual item history.
tobi_bsf|4 months ago
AlienRobot|4 months ago
zoidb|4 months ago
It has some features that I felt was missing from the terminal based readers out there already.
ebbi|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
hysan|4 months ago
dinkblam|4 months ago
can't we just call things "A thorough examination / analysis" anymore?
danhon|4 months ago
stevejb|4 months ago
disillusioned1|4 months ago
asa400|4 months ago
Some folks seem to like it.
rcarmo|4 months ago
Hamuko|4 months ago
ubermonkey|4 months ago
AndrewDucker|4 months ago
Keeps my feeds in sync between the mobile app and the web site, has pretty good keyboard shortcuts, mostly just gets out of the way, doesn't have ads I'm not sure what else I'd need
xela79|4 months ago
em-bee|4 months ago
https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email https://pypi.org/project/rss2email/
i have been using this for 20 years already. by now my own version has accumulated a few custom patches. but the original it is still under active development/support. some day i need to submit my changes upstream.
mike-cardwell|4 months ago
Olshansky|4 months ago
Was surprised to see no mention of it here.
browningstreet|4 months ago
gregoriol|4 months ago
glitchdout|4 months ago
Martin_Silenus|4 months ago
AlfredBarnes|4 months ago
exographicskip|4 months ago
FergusArgyll|4 months ago
NoSalt|4 months ago
codingclaws|4 months ago
aboardRat4|4 months ago
grigio|4 months ago
bityard|4 months ago
But I do have a wishlist of creature-comfort items that would probably never make it in:
* I go days/weeks without reading anything and trying to find out where I left off is a big pain. There doesn't seem to be a way to sort chonologicaly (only reverse).
* The only difference between read/unread items is a tiny gray dot in front of the article title. (I'd rather have the unread items stand out more from the read ones, with a different background, bold text, etc.)
* It would be nice to have a per-feed setting of whether to show the article as it appears in the RSS feed, or go fetch it from the web in reader mode.
James_K|4 months ago
rootnod3|4 months ago
integricho|4 months ago
prism56|4 months ago
samtrack2019|4 months ago
kqr|4 months ago
Here we go again... no, "consume content" is what the commercial social networks want you to do so you stick around until the next ad break. (Maybe even what a commercial SaaS RSS reader wants you to do so you pay the next bill.)
I use RSS specifically to get away from generic "content". Instead I read to learn things, and to explore opoinions I might not otherwise come in contact with, and to socialise with other people.
username223|4 months ago
harryvederci|4 months ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAtbFwzZp6Y
aboardRat4|4 months ago
thefz|4 months ago
sunaookami|4 months ago
ajkjk|4 months ago
aboardRat4|4 months ago
It's government's social program.
Most people are so ignorant about digital security that governments force media providers (social media, newspapers, bloggers) to make native content about how to not tell your bank password to a random person on the internet.
notachatbot123|4 months ago
dewey|4 months ago
nergal|4 months ago
abc123abc123|4 months ago
It is the Trump of RSS readers!
RemainsOfTheDay|4 months ago
[deleted]