Ask HN: Which RSS reader do you use? Its been some time since this question was asked. Every RSS reader I've used so far sucks. Either the built-in web support is poor or it stops fetching the feeds or renders then poorly. Sorry for my frustration, but I would like to know what everyone else is using and if they are satisfied with their RSS reader. |
On mobile, there is nothing I like, I consider Feeder on Android the least bad.
I also use Feeder for Android on my Supernote Nomad. It has the nice side benefit of creating EPUBs I can save/annotate/share.
I very much prefer to use a native app, and have no use for web-based RSS readers (I have created my own GPT-based AI summarizer that generates custom digests - https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/01/12/1730#daily-news-d...)
I’ve also got a soft spot for NetNewsWire, but don’t really use it since the above works for me to skim the equivalent of 200+ feeds over breakfast (I’m posting this from inside Reeder on my iPad mini).
I use self-hosted FreshRSS as the sync backend.
Great reader, I have been using it since Google Reader went away.
Works fairly well.
* Google Reader – until it was shut down.
* The Old Reader – from early 2015 until I became dissatisfied with its lack of features. I was a paying user, and while the developer was always courteous over email, no amount of feedback convinced them to add functionalities that had become standard among competitors, such as filtering by keywords.
* Bazqux – since a week after the November 2024 U.S. election. For my own mental health, I decided to filter out any news containing keywords like "Trump" or "Elon", and it has worked great so far.
How I Read My Feeds:
* On my laptop, I actually enjoy using Bazqux on the web, though I slightly customize its CSS using Stylus.
* On iOS, I use FeeddlerPro, which previously served me well when connected to my The Old Reader subscription.
Evaluations & Alternatives:
* During my search for the right RSS aggregator back in November, I evaluated Feedbin, Feedbro, Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire, NewsBlur, ReadKit, and a few others.
* One bridge I haven’t crossed yet is consuming YouTube via RSS. Since every channel already has an RSS feed, this approach would allow me to filter videos by keywords as well.
The only downside (or upside depending on your perspective) is that it is a local solution. You can only access it on a specific device, and it won't be syncing when that device is turned off.
Using Reeder Classic as an RSS client. Also something threatened by unwanted updates.
The long form: https://kevincox.ca/2013/06/27/email-as-rss-reader/
Recently I also extracted web reading into a separate library which should make writing new projects like RSS readers easier [1]
https://codeberg.org/newsraft/newsraft
Here is a video to see how it works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE-PhXnvp30
I used to use FreshRSS, but there were some minor pain points that eventually pushed me to find an alternative. Miniflux has been great so far. It's very minimalistic, which also makes it very lightweight to self-host, as I do, but you can also subscribe to the hosted version for about a dollar a month.
It's not great, but it generally works.
My major complaint is that articles are not locally stored, so if the online article goes away, its just gone.
I found this ironic, given that as an email client, a major function is local storage of messages.
Can't fault it.
You are welcome to use but don't complain the lack of functionality. I wrote it to suit my own need.
It's the good ole Yahoo Pipes clone! Would love for those who want to mix RSS feeds to try it out!
It has some extra functionality for certain websites like HackerNews so it shows points, etc.
When using mobile I use https://capyreader.com/ which has first class intigration with freshrss; meaning you can add/remove/view feeds via the app and have the changes sync with freshrss. Also, probably my favorite feature of capy reader, is that when you want to view the content of an rss article that is only a summary or headline (because few people publish the full content of their articles in the rss feed anymore), you can just press a button and it will fetch it for you and display it in the reader without sending you to a browser. So much happier and more accurately informed since moving back to RSS where I can choose what I want to see vs having it filtered/fed to me via some biased algorithm.
I use the freshrss web interface on my phone, that works quite well I feel. The app might not be necessary.
BTW, Freshrss also has a function to fetch the full article content directly. I think it's not especially clever, just uses a selector, but worked well for me for the one or two feeds where I enabled it.
Super minimal, I have MANY feeds, and it just does the thing very well.
Self-hosted. I like the news feed design and deboosting of already-seen entries.
> Either the built-in web support is poor or it stops fetching the feeds or renders then poorly.
I guess I am good with Feedly, and Google Reader and everything before that, is because I dont use the RSS Reader to read the content. I am only using RSS as News Headline [1]. And then will either Command Click, Right Click Open New Tab, Simply Click on it, depending on which OS and browser I am using to open them in a new Tab inside Browser.
Which is also the reason why I could end up with hundreds of tabs open. And I read them one by one. For these type of heavy browsing usage I recommend Firefox > Chrome > Safari.
So for my usage I actually think RSS should be a function inside a browser. But I know a lot of people use RSS reader differently.
[1] Which is also how I use Twitter as well. I simply have a list of people I follow and read those list only. So for me I dont ever understand why people are so upset with the For You Tab. But I guess I am the minority and I use it differently.
theoldreader is also good
I dont use anything other than the basic and I use it for free. Just curious What features are you looking for?
Reading this thread it seems everyone uses RSS so differently I wish we could start another HN thread on this topic.
I use it with my iCloud and it's synced on my Mac & iPhone. It just works!
If they have been around for this long and the limit was the same over the years it is likely the reason why I passed them when switching from Google Reader.
https://miniflux.app https://readkit.app
I've used Miniflux for a long time, and its content manipulation features allows you to work around some of the oddities of RSS feeds you come across.
I use it lots through both the browser and its Android phone app (has an Iphone app, too) and both have been great.
With Inoreader as backend: https://www.inoreader.com/
- Very smooth experience between web, android, and iOS apps (I’m mentioning this first, as many other apps I’ve tried are flaky)
- Mark as read while scrolling (Very useful for quickly shortlisting items from the feed. This is probably the main reason I’ve been able to replace Inoreader with social media apps.)
- Rules to auto-delete duplicated items or if the title contains specific words.
[1] https://saeedesmaili.com/posts/my-content-consumption-workfl...
Also Feeder on Android: https://github.com/spacecowboy/Feeder
- Optimized display for images, videos, audio, and notifications
- Specialized optimization for RSSHub, allowing subscriptions to thousands of websites that don't offer RSS, such as X, Instagram, and Telegram
- AI-powered translation, summaries, and a daily important news summary
I self-host it
One does not really need a backend, but I have far too many feeds, plus Feedbin has a email feature which transforms newsletters into feeds. Also nice: Since this year there is a feature for broken feeds: Feedbin does some URL spelunking as to find a different URL on the same domain.
I use Reeder Classic instead of last years "New Reeder" because they have different paradigms: Classic has the bookmark folder with numbers structure, whereas the new Reeder has timeline/River of News paradigm without read/unread bits. That works for social media, but not for my case of subscribing to blogs which publish seldom. The author has promised to keep Reeder Classic current for the time being. Fingers crossed.
If Reeder Classic goes dead I either look into Unread or NetNewswire. The latter would be a homecoming – NNW was my first Feedreader back in 2003 or so. If Feedbin goes dead, I'd look maybe into a self-hosted backend or go backend-less.
I also try to never follow more than 10 feeds (right now I'm at 12 because a couple only publish 2-3x year). I only have a few really interesting things to read every day. FOMO was real when I started doing this years ago with NextCloud, but I learned to deal with that. I love this setup.
If you’re interested in how well-behaved your client is, you can read Rachel’s posts.
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/
I actually removed it primarily because it was the last package on my system at the time to need python, and removing it let me purge a whole bunch of python packages and save a lot of space!
These days I still read feeds via RSS, via a static golang binary. It lets me do filtering, and similar things:
[x] Fetch original content
But most power comes from URL rewrite rules. Here is the one I use for problematic sites:
rewrite("^(.+)$"|"https://markdown.download/$1")