A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I’m using Feedly Classic on iOS. I would like to move off of it, but I have yet to find any other RSS client which presents the articles in a card like view which you can vertically swipe through to mark them as read.
Feedly themselves abandoned this UI for an infinite scrolling list on their main app. All other RSS clients I tried have this similar UI, which I feel is really poor.
Miniflux is great. I use Wallabag as my read it later app and selfhost both on a cheap VPS. They're tightly integrated but Miniflux supports several other integrations
I also use miniflux, have used it for more than a year and I have not looked for alternatives, which is good sign.
I use Flux News on android to consume my feeds. https://github.com/KevinCFechtel/FluxNews
I've found the PWA adequate for my phone usage. I found a custom CSS that is sort of a Gruvbox that I really like.
I really liked Miniflux and its clean design too too, but I found without an adequate categorization functionality, it quickly became overwhelming. Since I don't check my RSS reader as often as I should, it eventually got overwhelming and I had to switch to FreshRSS.
FreshRSS has been amazing, as you said, other readers have other goals in mind and seems RSS is just an add-on.
On Android's also there are no good clients, I've been using the PWA which is good enough.
There are several extensions for mobile menu improvements, I have Smart Mobile Menu, Mobile Scroll Menu and Touch Control (it works great on Firefox, but not on brave, it's too sensitive there, so YMMV).
There's also ReadingTime, but there are feeds which don't send the whole body of the post, so you might only see a 1minute read because of that.
The extension AutoTTL processes the feeds and makes them update only when it's more likely for them to get new items instead of every X minutes configured by FreshRSS.
Still there's a problem when the MaxTTL happens, all feeds are allowed to be updated and you might hit some rate limits, so I developed a rate limiter. Still there's a problem with AutoTTL because how extensions are loaded and with the http code reported by FreshRSS.
I found this project which receive the emails of newsletters and turns them into a RSS feed, I've only used it for one feed and I've only received one entry, not sure if the newsletter is that bad or if the site struggles to receive/show them. Haven't tried something it.
https://github.com/leafac/kill-the-newsletter
There's also this repo linking a lot of sites with feeds, and some sites which don't offer feeds directly are provided via feedburner (which seems it's a Google service and wikipedia says "primarily for monetizing RSS feeds, primarily by inserting targeted advertisements into them", so use those at your own discretion)
https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds
I can recommend FeedMe on Android, I've been using it with FreshRSS for a couple years now and really like it, it has a lot of features and is very configurable.
Capy and Read You are both solid Android FreshRSS-compatible reader apps.
Do you know if there is an extension that creates a more Feedly/Flipboard like view?
I just use Nextcloud News since I am already using Nextcloud. It works well and installs in just a few clicks.
For feeds I can only recommend to get rid of HN, its gives you a skewed perspective and is a huge waste of time. The only thing its good for is begging for support when Google deactivates your account.
Could you elaborate a bit on the HN being skewed? I only just subscribed myself and am genuinely curios.
HN is hosted by ycombinator, a VC, and represents only a tiny fraction of the IT industry. Its mainly the silicon valley startup side of things. So you can expect a motley crew of ai and crypto bros, musk fanboys and JavaScript prophets.
The articles and especially the comments there might lead you to belief that in software development there isn't anything outside of Cloud-native Web Applications. For example, two of the most popular programming languages that are currently used are Java and C#. Yet you wont find much discussion about them on HN because it is presumably unfashionable to use these languages in a startup.
This extends to most topics from operating systems to open source programs. Largely hype based discussion around new and shiny things.
There is also a very strong libertarian bias on HN. Look at the comments of any article that relates to a EU regulation like the DMA, CRA or GDPR and you will see what I mean. Its mostly libertarian pearl clutching and not much actual discussion.
Definitely don’t disagree with your opinions on HN, I opted to drop the feed after a few days because you can get a sense of what you are describing pretty quickly.
What feeds are you using for tech/development?
Admittedly I’m still learning my way around Linux and trying to wrap my head around JavaScript and Python. So I don’t need anything too aggressive, but I’d like to stay informed. I tried DEV.to but it was too many posts all at once, maybe I can tweak the feed!
Its hard to give you something concrete. The topics you gave as examples are vast. For my own purposes I add feeds to my rss reader based on what I come across by reading other articles in my reader.
Maybe checkout some communities about the topics you are interested. Lemmy has for example a large and enthusiastic Linux community. Brodie Robertson also covers a lot of different Linux topics. You can also take a look at recordings of developer conferences. The people that give talks often write a blog as well.
I use Reeder classic for iOS. Plain and simple and easy to add feeds to. It works with my old reader account so that was a win for me.
I want to set up hoarder once all my components arrive for the home server. Soon I hope!
I use https://tt-rss.org/ The devs are kinda jerks, but the app works decently if you can self-host. Theres also a couple of phone-apps that work fairly well.
FreshRSS backend and Lire (iOS)
Love it! Well worth the app purchase I couldn’t be happier with my setup.
Is there a pure black oled mode? I need the higher contrast
Yes. There is a black color theme that works well for OLED
Thank you
I use NetNewsWire. Since I am happily entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, it works great with its iCloud syncing. This way I can use it on my phone and laptop while not having to set up any server-side infrastructure or rely on a third party to host anything. (Granted I am relying on the iCloud storage for device syncing. But it did not involve any kind of setup and the files are encrypted such that Apple cannot read them.)
I use Feedly, it has a nice iOS client too. It has some nice integrations for saving articles for later reading
I landed on lire for iOS after trying out a few apps, for my FreshRSS instance. It works and has spotlight indexing, which is nice.
I’ve also been using News Explorer which relies on iCloud for sync. I like to have the separate app just to change up the feed notifications and News Explorer has a grid view that works for me on an iPad. I mostly use this for news sites, and I found the grid view to be the most pleasing for those kinds of articles.
FressRSS gave me a UI I was looking for on both mobile and desktop, and it "just works".
My only complaint, and I'm sure this isn't a feature found anywhere, is that I wish you could actually delete an article, not just "archive it". Some of the stuff that gets through on RSS is unfiltered NSFW crap, and I really would rather not have that on my home server!
Might not be the answer you are looking for but I use Friendica - So I can pull in content from RSS/Atom as well as ActivityPub feeds. I sort of separage into Channels and Groups news related stuff seperate from actual people. I then use a number of different ActivtiyPub apps like Fedilab, Racoon to access my Friendica account
I use Inoreader. Not selfhosted but that is everything i have at that company. The articles are public anyway so I don't care that much.
My workflow is article maximize and try to hide everything else like menubar and list of sources etc. I use jk to navigate for scrolling and v/space to go to article. I use vimium extension so d for close tab with article. Article is automatically marked as read as I scroll. It takes 5 min per day to go through. I think if I would selfhost then I would try tiny rss.
I don't use it on phone. No need. I am at my computer most of the time.
I’ve been using FreshRSS and Reeder (now Reeder Classic) since google reader stopped being a thing. It's pretty great.
Mentioning Five Filters because no one has mentioned it yet. It will pull the full text of the articles and present them to you in your RSS reader (or FreshRSS) so you don't have to navigate to a browser to read the article. Everything takes place in your native RSS app. I use it as a docker container. Actually, I create a stack with FreshRSS and Five Filters in the stack.
Five Filters has a paid service, but they also have a free docker app for people who want to self-host. https://github.com/heussd/fivefilters-full-text-rss-docker
I'm still searching for a good iOS reader app for FreshRSS.
I’ve been using NetNewsWire. It’a free and open source and works with FreshRSS.
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/netnewswire-rss-reader/id1480640210
Five Filters has a paid service, but they also have a free docker app for people who want to self-host. https://github.com/heussd/fivefilters-full-text-rss-docker
That container is running PHP5. Make sure to either not run it public or to properly secure it.
On iOS, I’ve used Reeder 4 and 5 for many years. It’s great. It’s been renamed to Reeder Classic. Worth every dollar!
The new Reeder is a multi format feed reader. I like the classic RSS only format.
Been happy with FreshRSS for years now (TTRSS before that). One thing that really improves it is RSS-Bridge which turns a lot of non RSS sites into feeds (and a lot of truncated feeds into full ones). It's also a list of what hackerly types will put effort into getting a feed from, so self-curating in its way. Enjoy...
As an RSS user since the early days, there's something I never get: why is this something that people are hosting? Are you really all consuming so much news, so much of the time, that you need to do it simultaneously on two devices? That sounds like news overload to me but what do I know.
Personally, I catch up once a day for an hour (or two). Seem more than enough and means I only ever need an RSS client. Right now: the Feedbro add-on in Firefox desktop.
As for tips and tools, RSSBox is a useful one. IMO if RSS were more popular this is the sort of thing that would be built into the client.
The point of having the RSS reader somewhere not on my PC is that when I reinstall my PC it's one less thing to configure again. I just open the browser bookmark and there it is exactly as I left it.
OK. Given that self-hosters are maintaining two PCs already, I suppose that's fair.
I use Feedbro, a firefox addon
I use the FeedBro add-on for Firefox. It's highly configurable and works like a dream. I've not found anything better, honestly.
I selfhost Tiny Tiny RSS
The best use of RSS I ever found was to put a feed of Metafilter/Slashdot/Hackernews/Lemmy into my magicmirror so when I blearily woke up in the morning, I could watch a stream of article titles flow by while I brushed my teeth.
Try the iOS app Unread: An RSS Reader. I use a self-hosted FreshRSS instance with API access enabled as the Unread app uses the Fever API (see link below). The Unread app typography is absolutely beautiful. I use the app without a subscription as it’s expensive but given how great it is, I’m considering subscribing to support continued development.
https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_Fever_API.html
Akregator, it works.
Feeds, dunno news sites (ars technica, phoronix). A lot of random blogs and articles, some forums (acoup.blog, aeon.co). Some youtube channels (most in my language, isaac arthur, AvE).
Yunohost + freshrss is an amazing combo.
I use nextcloud for a lot of stuff, so added the news app. In that I have a lot of GitHub repos I want to know get updated and things like the register and BBC news UK.
Edit: that also have a mobile app for just the RSS feeds
Nextcloud News with the accompanying app on my phone. I was lazy that day