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The RSS feed reader landscape

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11–20 of 206 posts

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#11
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.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#12
post #11

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.

+1 for NetNewsWire, truly delightful. I wish there was a Linux version.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#15
post #7

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.

If you're on iOS or MacOS I can highly recommend NetNewsWire ( https://netnewswire.com/ ).

Seconded. I've been using NetNewsWire for a couple of decades, and it does the unglamorous job of displaying feeds without ads, nags, or feature churn.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#17
I'll just shill my own feed reader here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re...

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 ;)

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#19
post #11

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.

I have used NetNewsWire since 2003.

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.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#20
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!

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