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.
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.
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.
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.
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 the FeedBro add-on for Firefox. It’s highly configurable and works like a dream. I’ve not found anything better, honestly.
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!
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.
I use Feedbro, a firefox addon
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.)
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.
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.
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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
Yunohost + freshrss is an amazing combo.
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).
