Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Using Thunderbird for RSS

rubenerd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 38 posts

Re: Using Thunderbird for RSS

#21

Post by jgneff »

SoftTalker wrote: post #19

I installed Thunderbird for the first time today, and removed it about an hour later. It sat there idle chewing up 67% of a CPU core.

That might have been Thunderbird doing its initial indexing of your existing messages. It's the first thing I disable after installing Thunderbird: go to Settings > General > Indexing (at the bottom of the page) and uncheck the setting for "Enable Global Search and Indexer." I always found it extremely slow and CPU intensive, and just not worth it, especially when you have IMAP server-side search.

Re: Using Thunderbird for RSS

#22

Post by celsoazevedo »

HaloZero wrote: post #18
celsoazevedo wrote: post #13

I've tried to switch from Feedly to a self-hosted solution last month, and tested some of the different open-source options. Different UIs aside, one of the issues I kept having was that some of my feeds wouldn't load because sites now have a bot/scrapping/AI protection in place (Cloudflare, Anubis, etc), breaking RSS readers. And that was with a residential IP, it was even worse if I routed traffic via a popular VPS…

Thank you for this post. I was debating about moving from Feedly and this just saved me a lot of headaches. At this point the main reason I stay on Feedly is their ability to handle fake email subscriptions into their RSS format. So many blogs and other places don't provide RSS anymore :(

I'd still give it a try if you have the time. You can easily run some of the alternatives with docker containers and from there you just need to import your OPML from Feedly. You don't have to switch, but it may work better for you than it did for me (it clearly works well enough for some) and you'd have an idea of the different UIs and approaches.

I only use real RSS feeds, so I'm not sure if there's an open source alternative that can replace Feedly for sites that don't have a feed.

For small blogs, especially those I sometimes find here on HN, usually they'll add a feed if you ask them. Sometimes it's just something they forgot to enable in their site generator or maybe they already have a feed, but it's a weird URL and it's not declared in the HTML. In my case it helps that the small blogs I follow are often from people that avoid social media, like to host their stuff, etc, and see the benefits of following sites via feeds.

Re: Using Thunderbird for RSS

#23

Post by kev009 »

jerbearito wrote: post #15
kev009 wrote: post #4

I like Miniflux becuase it is easy to run and keeps a centralized status if you have multiple devices. I guess if Thunderbird supported the Fever protocol you could use them together unless there is some other method I'm not aware of?

I've wanted to try Miniflux for a long time, so a few weeks ago I set it up on a headless debian box I have running for some homelab services. That's part of my Tailscale network, so I was able to immediately start testing on desktop, phone, etc. It's great! I might take a stab at customizing the UI a bit. I like that it's opinionated but pretty bare-bones visually out of the box.

Yes, the web UI is not great but there is a nice iOS app called Reeder, and some desktop clients too. I'd love to use Thunderbird as the desktop client.

Re: Using Thunderbird for RSS

#25

Post by pabs3 »

emotiveengine wrote: post #20

I tried going back to Thunderbird for RSS recently just to get away from bloated web readers. The fact that you can use standard email rules to filter out high-volume noise is actually amazing. You can just auto-archive posts based on regex or keywords. But the lack of simple cross-device sync killed the experiment for me. If you read a few articles on your phone while commuting, your desktop client has no idea when…

Thunderbird is basically a web reader already though right? Its based on HTML and JS mostly.

Re: Using Thunderbird for RSS

#26

Post by goku12 »

emotiveengine wrote: post #20

I tried going back to Thunderbird for RSS recently just to get away from bloated web readers. The fact that you can use standard email rules to filter out high-volume noise is actually amazing. You can just auto-archive posts based on regex or keywords. But the lack of simple cross-device sync killed the experiment for me. If you read a few articles on your phone while commuting, your desktop client has no idea when…

> But the lack of simple cross-device sync killed the experiment for me. If you read a few articles on your phone while commuting, your desktop client has no idea when you get home.

There is an open source service named gpodder.net (web app, not the client app) that does this for podcasts. It doesn't just sync post read status, it can also sync added podcast feeds across supported clients on all devices.

Since podcasts are based on RSS feeds, this shows that what you seek is possible with regular feeds too. I don't know yet how gpodder does it, but that should be easy enough to find out because the web app seems to have good documentation in addition to being open source.

However, looking at the RSS and Atom feed formats, they seem to include some variation of a uuid per story. This is like message-ids in emails and should be useful in cross-device post status sync. This could be what gpodder uses for sync. A similar service for regular feeds would be easy enough to make. But it would need support across feed readers too, like how several podcast clients support gpodder.

> It is a great setup if you only ever consume news at one desk, but I ended up just sticking with Miniflux so my unread counts stay sane.

I'm considering deploying an aggregator too. So I'm curious. What made you settle with miniflux?

Re: Using Thunderbird for RSS

#27

Post by baruchel »

dugite-code wrote: post #11

I still perfer the TT-RSS, now on github without Fox (The dev most people had issues with). The android app isn't maintained at the moment but it's still one of the best rss apps I have ever used

I can confirm the TT-RSS app (found on F-Droid) is very good. I have used it for years. On the other hand, the web app is not very good, and each time I wanted to read articles on my computer from the web interface, I encountered huge issues (for some reason, the "right click / mark as read" never correctly worked on my computers, or at least with huge lags of several seconds). When my free TT-RSS provider closed, I decided to switch to FreshRSS and could compare several apps for Android; I finally set up the following workflow: free FreshRSS account + "Read You" (found on F-Droid also), and managed to achieve a very similar workflow than previously (with a much better web app).

Re: Using Thunderbird for RSS

#28

Post by gethly »

Doesn't opera/vivaldi also have built-in rss client, bit torrent client, e-mail client and irc client? Seems like a better way to have everting of this kind in one place. I wouldn't want to mix my emails with rss, that makes little sense to me.

Re: Using Thunderbird for RSS

#29

Post by dugite-code »

baruchel wrote: post #27
dugite-code wrote: post #11

I still perfer the TT-RSS, now on github without Fox (The dev most people had issues with). The android app isn't maintained at the moment but it's still one of the best rss apps I have ever used

I can confirm the TT-RSS app (found on F-Droid) is very good. I have used it for years. On the other hand, the web app is not very good, and each time I wanted to read articles on my computer from the web interface, I encountered huge issues (for some reason, the "right click / mark as read" never correctly worked on my computers, or at least with huge lags of several seconds). When my free TT-RSS provider closed, I…

Could have been due to using a free hosting provider for TT-RSS. I self-host it and have done so for almost a decade with very few issues.

That said as always with software your mileage may vary.

The Read you app looks promising, if a bit different workflow wise. I'll give it a shot with the Fresh API plugin. Thanks!

Re: Using Thunderbird for RSS

#30

Post by small_scombrus »

pabs3 wrote: post #25
emotiveengine wrote: post #20

I tried going back to Thunderbird for RSS recently just to get away from bloated web readers. The fact that you can use standard email rules to filter out high-volume noise is actually amazing. You can just auto-archive posts based on regex or keywords. But the lack of simple cross-device sync killed the experiment for me. If you read a few articles on your phone while commuting, your desktop client has no idea when…

Thunderbird is basically a web reader already though right? Its based on HTML and JS mostly.

IIRC Thunderbird is a fork of Firefox, so it can do all of the web things your heart desires
Post reply on HN