What RSS Reader do you use?
It's time for me to use an RSS reader again after 6 years of not using one. I used Feedly back in the day, but I wonder what I should use now.
What RSS reader do you use?
I use Newsblur[1] in the browser. The best part of Newsblur for me, is its intelligence trainer.
Suppose you want feeds from website A, but don't want certain stories tagged with "mice", or titles containing "epistemology", and you only want to see articles published by an author named "Joyce Smith", you can do that.
It's pretty great. Reading RSS feeds has become so much more pleasurable. The articles that do make it past the training filters are almost always what I do like to read.
[1]: https://newsblur.com
Feedly. Switched when google reader died, and honestly it's filled the hole perfectly, does all it needs to do, has premium options to support them. Fast, and clean.
Miniflux with the paid hosting plan[1].
Things I love about it (from [2]):
> Miniflux is a minimalist software. The purpose of this application is to read feeds. Nothing else.
> The Miniflux layout is optimized to scan entries quickly.
> The design of Miniflux is inspired by Hacker News, Lobsters and Pinboard.
> Miniflux uses Javascript only where it’s necessary.
And the content extraction for truncated feeds, customizable with CSS selectors, is an absolute killer feature that I use heavily.
I'm very happy to pay an annual subscription fee and I haven't looked back once since I started using it. I'm eagerly waiting for NetNewsWire to add support for the Fever API[3] so that I can use it with Miniflux. But the web UI on mobile is good enough to be honest.
[1]: https://miniflux.app
[2]: https://miniflux.app/opinionated.html
[3]: https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/issues/76
http://www.bazqux.com/ - I paid for a lifetime subscription a couple years ago and never looked back. The interface is great is both desktop and mobile, since it’s online everything is kept in sync across devices and I can configure the interface to my liking. I tried many RSS readers and nothing came close.
I've been using Tiny Tiny RSS since Google shut down their reader. https://tt-rss.org/
Certainly not perfect, but it fits my needs and doesn't cost anything. Also has an Android app, so I can easily check my feeds whenever I want.
Inoreader. It allows me to add rss, twitter and youtube and apply rules and filters as to what to include / exclude.
I don’t like twitter but sometimes that’s the only way people communicate or share their art. Inoreader lets me add twitter users with a filter (e.g not interested in tweets without pictures (artists), not interested in retweets, only interested in tweets that contain ‘released’, ‘beta’ or ‘rc’ (software).
Really cool for trimming down the noise and a smooth, clean experience.
I read RSS in Emacs using mu4e. I used to use Gnus, but it's (a) really slow and (b) causes Emacs to freeze (since it's written in Emacs Lisp, which isn't concurrent); in contrast mu4e delegates work to a separate process, and is generally faster (e.g. using an indexed Xapian DB).
I'm a sucker for mindlessly checking feeds, so I only poll feeds every few hours to avoid a drip-drip of new posts throughout the day. I do this with a cron job (now a systemd service). This job also converts RSS and ATOM to maildir, since that's all mu4e supports.
It turns out there are loads of programs for polling+downloading+caching+converting news feeds, but I couldn't find any that just convert; so I made my own by stripping down one of those existing projects ( http://chriswarbo.net/git/feed2maildir ).
Reeder on iOS/Mac with Feedly as the back-end and a handful of private feeds being fetched directly. Has a great Read Later feature as well as a working Reading Mode that save me a lot of time.
with Reeder on my iPhone.
Miniflux like so many supports the Fever API which means I can use almost any RSS app on the platform I need it on. I also wrote a small sidekick for Miniflux that I can use to filter posts I don't like (Sponsored posts etc.): https://github.com/dewey/miniflux-sidekick
Feedly as the backend, Unread as my (iOS) reader, it's a very nice looking application and doesn't scroll weirdly like Feedly does/usedto. Instapaper to save things for later or to read on a computer to act on something.
Unread also does an Instapaper-like reader view which you can turn on feed-wide for those shitey RSS feeds that only give you the excerpt.
https://feedly.com
https://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/unread/
Switched and started paying when Reader shut down, haven't regretted it.
Fraidyc.at!
It's an extension by kickscondor, with some great opinionated UI choices.
https://fraidyc.at/
I self-host FreshRSS on a cloud server. It was pretty straightforward to setup as a docker container. The default has it running a cron job every 20 min to check for new content. You can use the FreshRSS web interface for reading but I typically use Reeder (iOS) to read my content.
Thunderbird. Yes, the e-mail client.
Adding a new feed is neither user friendly, nor obvious, but it's nice to not need an extra program to read feeds.
https://feedbin.com works perfectly for me. I like the relatively clean design and the pricing isn't outrageous.
I use the Reeder app on iPad and iPhone to interface with Feedbin.
Feedbin. Can't recommend it highly enough -- fast, simple, works super well.
You haven’t mentioned what you want to use RSS for, so I‘ll try to provide some context as to how I use it.
Feedbin account linked to NetNewsWire on my iPad, iPhone and Mac. I chose Feedbin because it is 1. A paid subscription, I forgot what I paid, but $50/year I want to say and 2. A ton of RSS apps support it. I like the clear cut relationship and expectations of being a customer, not merely an entitled user with a free account, and I like that Feedbin is effectively platform agnostic and not tied to a specific client as long as you have a client that supports it.
NetNewsWire is my preferred client, but this is as much out of complacency as anything else. I’ve used some version of NetNewsWire for close to 15 years now. The current v5 series of releases is a very neat client, has a good team led by Brent Simmons developing it, and while I’m not sure what the feature is called, has a neat reader mode that can load the whole post even in partial-post feeds.
I use RSS mainly for blogs and webcomics, but I have a couple of news sites loaded in there as well. Most of those also send me Newsletters which I have automatically forwarded to my Instapaper account from my Inbox. I skim most posts, read some others in NetNewsWire, but if an individual post is long and I want to do more than skim, it goes straight to Instapaper. If it’s worth keeping for reference or to read again, it goes from Instapaper to my Pinboard Archive. I mark the news feeds as read about once a week regardless of whether I’ve gotten to it or not because most of it has a shelf life and if there was anything important I probably heard about it on some podcast.
I used to use Feedly, but found I didn't check it often and lost track of things, I wanted a way of getting RSS by email so created https://rssby.email/ during lockdown.
TinyTinyRSS. Author of it is a jerk, but the ecosystem of client apps is solid, and I can run it on my Sandstorm server.
News on my Nextcloud server, it's kind of buggy but having the sync between devices is really valuable. Before that it was Thunderbird.
I used to use Newsblur [0] after GReader shut down, but then they raised the prices and as I pretty much used none of their fancy features I switched to self-hosting Tiny Tiny Rss [1]
[0]: https://newsblur.com/
[1]: https://tt-rss.org/
Minimalistic, simple, easy-to-use.
I use a dockerized version running in locally with a postgres database.
Elfeed, an Emacs RSS reader. Recently discovered I can jump to feed searches (eg news, longform, tech, etc) using Bookmarks and now very happy with it.
Still using Feedly.
Interesting you point to the 6 years time frame, I didn't realise how long I have been using Feedly. And I use RSS Reader even before Google Reader. The workflow is the same for the past 20 years. Command + Click a bunch of links. And that's it.
This has been a process for me. I started out using TinyTinyRSS and a few other apps. I always wanted an RSS reader that I could use anywhere on any device. I have finally settled on rss2email. I can read on any device I can access my email. I have setup an email just for rss feeds (rss@mydomain.com) and use a server side filter to put the feeds in the correct mailbox. I love the idea of not introducing another app to manage something.
For mail I use mutt. Mutt and rss2email are a match made in heaven. I can quickly process the stuff I want to read and the stuff I have little interest in. Feeds like Hacker News can get out of hand quickly without the ability to quickly process...
They kept a bunch of the same shortcut keys and stuff that I liked about google reader. It's cloud based so you can pickup where you left off from any device.
I use (and pay) for Inoreader. I was a loyal subscriber to Feedbin for a few years but the developer made some UI changes for the worse, and then wasn't interested in feedback. After a couple of long outages, I decided to switch away.
Newsboat! Pro tip: include the "reload threads " in your config file to greatly speed up loading.
After google reader, I use theoldreader.com
I'm using the Reeder app on iOS, it syncs with a bunch of services. Before I was using Fiery Feeds, but they switched to a subscription model and the app I had paid for wasn't supported anymore.
I'm using QuiteRSS for Windows, I like the UI and the functionalities it's been working good for me except for some crushes when I upgraded to Windows 10, but they are rare. And it's free.
Feedbro on Firefox. Takes nicely care of my ~200 feeds, and without the friction of some external program having to launch the browser.
Tiny Tiny might be an option if the feature set has evolved to justify running a server somewhere. Last time I looked, it didn't, but that's years ago. And anyway, it's probably a good thing to have no feeds on my phone.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedbroreader
I use and recommend Feedbin[1].
The interface is pretty good, privacy is respected as far as I can see, service is hosted on their hardware, not in the cloud, the author is very responsive when issues arrive, and the code is available for self-hosting[2].
It is also how I keep up with people on Twitter and YouTube without having to access Twitter or YouTube.
[1] https://feedbin.com/
[2] https://github.com/feedbin
BazQux Reader [1]. I'm developer (a bit biased for sure) but I like to eat my own dog food everyday.
[1] https://bazqux.com
Self-hosted FreshRSS + Reeder on iOS. I haven't found a decent FOSS Android client that syncs with FreshRSS yet, unfortunately, so I just use local Feeder on there.
Self-hosted FreshRSS + Reeder 4 on Macbook / iPad / iPhone, to connect to my FreshRSS instance.
I used to use Newsblur, great choice if a service works better for you.
Switched to Feedly and used it for years after Google Reader died, I think it's pretty good.
I wanted offline reading though so I ended up rolling my own [1], it's a bit rough and I don't really need the offline thing since I'm at home most of the time but I still use it out of habit.
[1] https://github.com/TimDeve/rasasa
Inoreader.
Tested a few others, e.g. the Digg Reader, around the time Google Reader was discontinued, but Inoreader was closest in functionality to GR so stuck with that.
I've used a self-hosted version of Stringer for a while: it's a barebones single-user RSS reader with very few other features. Probably not great if you plan on following lots of feeds in different categories, but it's perfect for me: https://github.com/swanson/stringer
Slack, using the RSS integration. I have a channel dedicated to social watch, mostly HN through hnrss [1], and a channel for blogs and more article-shaped content.
I only use Slack as a "new article notification" system though, the reading happens on the original website where the content was posted.
[1] https://hnrss.org
Like a few others here, I use an RSS to email converter, although I'm using a custom-written one. The main difference from rss2email is that I'm not actually doing any SMTP - I'm just dumping files into a Maildir and letting isync do the uploading/downloading. The actual reading then happens mostly with Mutt (which also just interacts with Maildir).
Like some others have noted, using email as a storage mechanism reduces part of the problem (tracking which items are read/unread) to one that's already solved (by IMAP). Additionally, using isync lets me have local copies of everything; this used to be really important when I was a "poor" grad student, because I could do cool stuff like download a bunch of comics ahead of time on my laptop, then read webcomics/mailing-lists on the 2-hour bus ride. I still like having local copies of things on principle, although nowadays everybody is always-connected so it's not as useful.
I create a telegram channel and few lines of shell script and a systemd timer to feed it. Advantage is that I get to read the entire post fast without going to a browser or custom app (instantview only works only in mobile app). E.g. https://t.me/instant_news_tech
I use the Feedbro extension for Firefox, but grain of salt, I only just started using it a week ago. Not sure what features are good for Feed Readers, but this one is great for my office computer. I don't really "need" it to carry over to my other devices like Inoreader can do.
Inoreader (two accounts attached together).
Currently also using NewsBlur for Stackoverflow tracking with fetchrss.com for FB and other custom feeds, however, I am moving those into my second Inoreader account.
For GitHub project tracking I use BazQux, and still do.
The one I wrote for myself.
It's a janky one page PHP file + either simplepie or picofeed for the backend; using flat-file lists to store the feeds themselves. And it's PERFECT for me. Been using it for years.
As a non-professional (literally, I don't program for a living primarily, I sometimes teach classes in beginner stuff) this is the kind of thing I'd love to encourage more non-professionals to do. No need for even "apps" here.
https://gitlab.com/jrm4/mahrss
In action:
https://jrm4.com/mahrss
FreshRSS. It's pretty good and much like Google Reader, if you liked that.
Elfeed which is a reader for emacs. But I'm slowly switching over to gnus.
Feedly as the aggregator, Palabre on Android as the reader.
I rarely read rss on my laptop these days, but Palabre keeps the read articles in sync so I can hop on the Feedly web interface and resume at any time.
I was a fan of Inoreader, but after the licensing change it became too much expensive for my huge number of feeds.
So I discover FeedWrangler (https://feedwrangler.net/): it's a good system, very clean, with lot of interesting feature (like automatic filtering, 3rd parties integration, etc.).
The only lack is an Android client.
In the future I would like to migrate on self-hosted (if I found the time to reboot my home Docker Swarm cluster).
I self-host my own, since I found that other self-hosting solutions were too much of a pain to set up. It's brutally simple though, and basically only supports my RSS usecase (notifications, not consumption): https://github.com/rcxdude/nobsrss (if it looks dead from the repo consider it's still running fine and I haven't needed to touch it since then)
Newsboat using Syncthing to keep the state the same over my various devices. All the advantages of a web based reader without ever having to log in to anything.
News Explorer on Mac & iOS. The iCloud sync saves me from having to host another service myself, and the price is a one-off instead of a subscription.
Feedly. Switched to it when Google Reader shut down. It is fast and has a modern looking yet clean interface. Gets the work done with minimal distraction.
I then filter them into a folder and now I have a cross-platform synced RSS reader. I can also do any sort of filtering that I want with email filters.
The only real downside is that I haven't found a mail client that will pre-download images in the items. But I can read the text offline at least.
I wrote my own using nodejs. It's nowhere near complete enough for anyone else to use, but I'm enjoying building features as I need them. Thanks to covid, I just host it on my local network so I can browse on my phone since we are home all the time.
https://github.com/schwartzworld/rss
I'm using a home brew one I made in PHP when Reader closed. I already had RSS and Atom parsers, just slapped a quick UI on. Backed in Sqlite.
I’m using Feedly or Inoreader + Reeder 4 currently
Does anyone else not use one? I get my news and reading content from HN, NYT, Google News, the national news service in my country and from Alexa which gives me news from CNN, Sky News and my national news service. I also check Twitter from time to time but I try not to see it's always negative.
BBC News is another source I browse to from time to time.
I'm self-hosting selfoss [1]. Runs on PHP and sqlite (or MySQL), and also has integrations with some websites that don't support RSS feeds, e.g. Twitter and Reddit. Also comes with an app on Android.
[1] https://github.com/fossar/selfoss
I use Feedly as the syncing engine but never interact with it directly.
https://github.com/p-e-w/krill
I use krill because I like to get my feeds in a CLI. It also supports adding twitter. Development has stopped a while ago and I don't know of any active forks unfortunately.
I am using Feedly on web and FeedMe (syncing with Feedly) on android. FeedMe has many more services integration.
I use https://cortadomail.com to get RSS feeds (and other sources) in email. I personally really like the workflow of getting a daily digest of all of my RSS feeds in a single email each day. (Disclaimer: I built this tool.)
I use the marvellous ReadKit (https://readkitapp.com/) on the Mac – it has RSS and Instapaper support.
On iOS I use Reeder.
My feeds themselves are managed by Feedly but I rarely use that interface.
Reeder is great. I’ll think about going back to NetNewsWire when they add The Old Reader.
News Explorer on MacOS and on iOS. It syncs through iCloud, and this obviously only works if all your reading is on Apple devices.
For many years I used Reeder with syncing through Feed Wrangler. I switched because rendering is better with News Explorer.
I've noticed many web sites don't have RSS. I've set up Huginn, and it sends me emails from multiple resources in a digest form. I apply filters to emails from Huginn, creating a separate "feed" in my inbox.
Feeder.co extension - it's even supported on Firefox for mobile (or rather it used to be, Firefox broke extension support on latest builds). It's easy to open all the unread articles, it's lightweight and fast.
I was using the hosted Miniflux instance, until their database went out, and they decided that archiving unread items would be fun. Now I'm using what I've used for like the last 3-4 years now. simplerssreader.com
I'm still trying to find a good app for Android tablets that has a decent tablet UI and supports one of the major syncing services. On my iPad Pro, I was previously using Feedly + NetNewsWire, which was fantastic.
Miniflux, prior to that it was Feedly for a number of years, but I eventually opted for a self-hosted solution and it does the job well alongside Reeder for iOS. Some people may find it lacking in features however.
Brief Firefox extension.
Very rarely though. It comes in very handy from time to time, like for instance when looking for something specific on Craigslist. Much easier to scan a bunch of feeds than to muck around with the website.
https://feeds.pub A "social" RSS reader on which I can see what feeds are others following. (Disclaimer: I am the author of feeds.pub)
The feeds are predefined (curated), but the articles are sorted by Facebook engagement.
Reeder with feeds from Feedly (manually added feeds, not suggested).
Nextcloud has a News app which is a rss reader, that is what i use.
One build into my mail client, which is Thunderbird at the time.
Reeder on iOS and macOS with Inoreader.com as syncing backend
After firefox dropped support for live bookmarks I switched to the "Livemarks" plugin. Works the same as before: RSS is just part of your bookmarks menu.
Found nothing that had the perfect combination of what I wanted from an RSS feeder. After like 30 tries I gave up and made my own. Best RSS feeder in the world!
Liferea. I got tired of putting everything on a webserver.
Looks and feels very much like Google Reader.
Currently using Fiery Feeds on Mac OS. It has some rough edges still, but also some very nice power features and the author is very responsive.
I pay for Newsblur since Google Reader was cancelled
Prior to that I was using Miniflux, but I wanted to apply some filters to a particular feed and I realised that I already had a tool with advanced features for filtering and organising short messages with a subject and body: email.
On Android I've been using an Open Source app called Feeder I installed from the F-Droid app store. It's refreshingly basic.
Leaf. It has a wonderful feature where it will pull the contents of pages for feeds that don't include the actual post content.
Podcast Addict, an app on my tablet and phone.
I use it to subscribe to several dozen podcasts, a few webcomics, and a comedian's tour schedule.
I recently stopped usimg feedly after abusive ads everywhere, after some research, newsify was my new pick and loving it so far!
I currently use the FeedBro Firefox Extension.
I use tt-rss as my backend with the fever emulation plugin. I use Reeder on my mac and iphone, and News+ on my android
I use a telegram bot on a private group
Akregator, a native (C++/Qt) application that runs on my machine. Happy user since ~2002 or so.
I only use the Feedly Notifier add-on for Firefox. It is displayed as a sidebar in the browser.
Can we start a petition for google to open source google reader? I LOVED that software!
Just in time thread, I also need to find a quick and minimalist RSS reader recently.
inoreader right now the free version. Although you can't delete RSS entries which is annoying, only mark them as read.
But I'm building my own product soon because I see quite a few UI flaws with inoreader.
I use FreshRSS as my reader and use RSS Bridge to expand a lot of feeds
rss2email. Goes straight into a folder in my mail account. I can read it from the Mail app on my phone, Thunderbird on desktop, and my web mail client.
I'm also a newsboat user. Very happy with it
Inoreader, the real successor to Google Reader.
I use Akregator (part of KDE) for many years.
I already use thunderbird for EMail, so..
I use a telegram bot in a private group
bazqux.com
The subscription is $30/year. I voluntarily opted in $50/year just because I like it so much.
FeedBro, chrome addon, quite good.
News App in my Nextcloud instance
bazqux.com, highly recommend.
Feedbro plugin in Firefox.
The excellent NetNewsWire
Take a look at rssmix
Roll your own.
Adjacent but related to this topic, I also use an RSS reader and I think it's something which a lot of non-programmers would really appreciate more. There are a lot of techy reasons why I like it (self-hosted is always nice, back-search is fun, I like the customization, etc) but especially during these stressful times, it's a great way of limiting obsessive scrolling in newsfeeds. I follow 300+ feeds, most only semi active so I can very easily get caught up on all the new article titles. Once I'm caught up, it's much easier for me be done and not keep scrolling. This is in stark contrast to other newsfeeds, and the control I have over the rss subscriptions means I don't get algorithmically manipulated to the same extent as other places. There are niche feeds I love and it's great having them collated
So three things: 1. talk to your friends about it, I've been advocating it to a lot of people and lots of them are interested. Feedly is relatively easy to setup for a layperson and showing them cool lesser-known feeds is a great way of getting them started (as you all know, there are niche blogs lots of places and the act of self-curation is really empowering). But if you self host, maybe offer to give them an acct...
2. I think gReader was a start but it was a slightly different newsfeed environment. Now everyone I talk to understands the dangers of newsfeeds and algorithmic manipulation, but they don't know what to do. I think there's a space for a RSS startup (or even feedly) to really press their advantage on self-curated feeds and no infinite scrolling that would appeal to a lot of people. The little RSS advertising I see are not focused on this
3. One thing people might miss is some twitter/fb/etc accounts which they know they like, and want to bring to their readers. I think a lot of people know the difference between the people they follow who they actually care about and the ones that are just on the same platforms. I'm thinking especially about Cory Doctorow's Adversarial Interoperability (https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6c-cory-doctorow-on-adve...) but if the platforms won't do it, having a free/open source twitter/fb/etc scraper that is reliable would be a huge win. I've tried some but a lot of them are buggy or expensive and it's annoying for a layperson. This could definitely be improved and I wish some of the platforms would export rss feeds too (e.g. youtube did and then it got weird). Also having easy integration to html-diff non-RSS websites would be great. I've used it to check for job postings, cdc news, etc, and I think a lot of people would like it.
All of which is to say, we have this old technology that is secretly adopted by a lot of websites (especially because of wordpress/etc which make it a default) and which could solve a lot of deep problems that a lot of people are struggling with. I think HN type people could really make impact here in expanding the userbase
Nextcloud [1] News [2] running on 'the server under the stairs' here at the farm. There's a few 'apps' which can be used in combination with it but I no longer use these since the web interface offers better performance.
[1] https://nextcloud.com
[2] https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/news