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The RSS feed reader landscape

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Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#131

Post by squirrellous »

hn-ifs wrote: post #126
squirrellous wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a user (yet) but just want to say I concur that email is the best medium for RSS feeds, so kudos.

I disagree, I use RSS so I don't need to clog up my email with feeds or sure updates, etc. I flat out refuse to sign up for mailing lists for the same reason. RSS is the perfect solution.

I probably should’ve qualified the “best medium” with something more specific. But I’ll submit two reasons why email is best for me and maybe some others:

- Email is the one thing that isn’t tied to any platform and ~always works, so it’s worth it to put in some effort into managing subscriptions / filters / labels / etc knowing that they will pay off indefinitely.

- It’s nice to consume content in the original format intended by the author, so I prefer receiving an article link in the email with a preview, and clicking through to read it. A dedicated reader invariably has problems rendering non-text content and doesn’t have all the features of a browser.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#132

Post by verisimi »

kqr wrote: post #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!

Feeder is excellent.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#133

Post by stranges »

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...

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#134

Post by swyx »

HanClinto wrote: post #28

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 th…

> I credit the demise of Google Reader with a lot of the downfall of the Old Web.

maybe you have causation wrong. social platforms were so effective they caused downfall of old web, and with it the demise of Google Reader

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#135

Post by skinnymuch »

stranges wrote: post #133

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...

Super cool to be able to get TikTok feeds. Getting social media feeds in general in feed reader seems great.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#137

Post by theshrike79 »

If you're doing your own reader, please check Rachel by the Bay's Feed Reader Score Project: https://rachelbythebay.com/fs/

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.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#138

Post by theshrike79 »

simonw wrote: 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.

Just discovered it a few months ago after using Reeder 3 (no need to upgrade to 4).

Works perfectly with a self-hosted FreshRSS backend.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#139

Post by theshrike79 »

kkukshtel wrote: post #21

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 tw…

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.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#140

Post by theshrike79 »

flkiwi wrote: post #91

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 othe…

I never upgraded to Reeder 4, stuck with 3 until I found (rediscovered?) NetNewsWire and connected it to my FreshRSS instance.
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