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. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/news-explorer/id1032668306
Seconded, it's awesome.
The RSS feed reader landscape
161–170 of 206 posts
Re: The RSS feed reader landscape
#162I 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.
Re: The RSS feed reader landscape
#163I 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 sof…
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.
Re: The RSS feed reader landscape
#164Just write your own RSS feed reader; it can be done easily in [relatively] few lines of JavaScript.
Re: The RSS feed reader landscape
#165Although 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:
- 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.
Re: The RSS feed reader landscape
#166I 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.
Re: The RSS feed reader landscape
#167I 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 wonde…
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?
Re: The RSS feed reader landscape
#168I 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 wonde…
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?
That is a good question and I had the same thought while constructing it. Almost like stock market diversification. You can represent the entire market pretty well with just a handful of stocks.
However, this seems like an overwhelmingly NO:
>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?
The NYT, and pretty much all publications, reflect a singular editorial perspective. I think at minimum you would want 1 left, 1 right, and 1 center.
Re: The RSS feed reader landscape
#169I 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…
> 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 kille…
> 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.
In this case, I made two copies of the same post on the same platform. The only difference was whether the contents of the post were hosted on FB or if they were hosted on a competitor's platform.
It's not a question of medium (LinkedIn vs. Facebook). It's a question of algorithmic prioritization within the same platform.
Facebook deprioritizes my posts when I include hyperlinks to external websites -- I suspect especially if those sites don't run Meta ads.
It was the same video with the same text. The only difference was a hyperlink.
I want to support bloggers and content creators that I like (on a variety of platforms). Facebook skewed their algorithm to disproportionately show content hosted on their domains. I understand why they do that (advertising $$$ and "engagement" metrics) -- I just don't appreciate what it does to the user experience.
> 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?
Yes -- I tried Feedly and Inoreader. Maybe I should give The Old Reader a shot?
The feed-reading part of those clones is fine -- but again, what I miss is the sharing and discussion that could happen so easily within my social network with Google+ and Google Reader. The RSS piece is almost the least important piece for me.
Re: The RSS feed reader landscape
#170Newsboat + 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'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.