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The RSS feed reader landscape

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41–50 of 206 posts

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#42
post #9

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.

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?

Requirements:

- Linux support

- doesn’t make me click a link and load the video in the browser, but plays in app

Akregator on KDE Plasma doesn’t support this, but you’d think “video/podcast” support would be a feature listed in the bullets of the feed reader software. A lot of the readers I looked at did not have it listed on a quick glance.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#46
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.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#47
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.

[1] https://www.jasonthorsness.com at https://www.jasonthorsness.com/rss.xml

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#50
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.

> 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.

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