I am trying to move away from social media this year, read more news to stay informed and self-host more services. So I figured RSS is the best path forward, but I’m struggling to find a good configuration for my needs, so I thought I’d start a discussion. Also open to any feed recommendations.
I started with Hoarder, which I’m enjoying, but it feels like a solution best used for saving sites/images for reference and not day to day reading. Installed FreshRSS yesterday and absolutely loving it, the web interface is really nice. But I’ve not found an iOS app I like, I’ve got NetNewsWire installed, but it doesn’t seem to acknowledge the Visibility setting in FeshRSS. Which is my favorite setting, I’d like to have some feeds excluded from the main feed (BBC News or DEV.to for example). Maybe there is another way to achieve this with FreshRSS and NetNewsWire.
Any FreshRSS tips?
How do you do RSS personally and any iOS app recommendations?
Also any favorite feeds, I’ve currently got Hackaday, Hacker News, Ars Technica and self.st. I’d like more coding and 3D suggestions, but I’m open to anything.
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 haveSmart Mobile Menu,Mobile Scroll MenuandTouch 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
AutoTTLprocesses 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-newsletterThere’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-feedsI 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.
Do you know if there is an extension that creates a more Feedly/Flipboard like view?
Capy and Read You are both solid Android FreshRSS-compatible reader apps.
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 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
Sprung for Lire because $10 isn’t too bad (better than a subscription). But I need some convincing on why you like it? Still trying to figure out how I want to manage my feeds, using the All Articles isn’t working for me.
It’s an RSS reader. Reviews are extremely positive. It collects no data. App has thoughtful configurations, adding subscriptions is smooth and I made it work for me.
Freshrss and ReadYou
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 Feedly, it has a nice iOS client too. It has some nice integrations for saving articles for later reading
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…
I use Feedbro, a firefox addon
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.
I selfhost Tiny Tiny RSS
I use the FeedBro add-on for Firefox. It’s highly configurable and works like a dream. I’ve not found anything better, honestly.
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
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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.
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.
