The RSS feed reader landscape(lighthouseapp.io) |
The RSS feed reader landscape(lighthouseapp.io) |
Here we go again... no, "consume content" is what the commercial social networks want you to do so you stick around until the next ad break. (Maybe even what a commercial SaaS RSS reader wants you to do so you pay the next bill.)
I use RSS specifically to get away from generic "content". Instead I read to learn things, and to explore opoinions I might not otherwise come in contact with, and to socialise with other people.
It's government's social program.
Most people are so ignorant about digital security that governments force media providers (social media, newspapers, bloggers) to make native content about how to not tell your bank password to a random person on the internet.
It is the Trump of RSS readers!
AI could be a real game changer for anyone who runs their own server or homelab. If you can't find a reader you like, just make one! It's not that hard these days.
I'm using Inoreader which does that - I have a folder that is displayed as titles only, and a different one that displays as "cards".
I've tried a few of the more famous self-hosted ones, but none of them have that feature. I know that a keyboard shortcut can be used to change views, but my early-morning doomscrolling brain doesn't want to think about that.
I've been using it since then without paying anything and it works ok.
If you have only used device-local readers before and have a server to spare, I recommend at least trying it!
- NetNewsWire was slick, but wouldn't work on my phone.
- Feedbin was excellent, but eventually I decided to do some subscription cost-cutting.
- Miniflux worked fine, but 1) I found it a pain to set up with remote hosted Postgres and 2) it burned through the Neon free-tier usage limits in a couple days.
So I built one myself and run it on a Raspberry Pi home server.
Made a great little weekend project. The feed standards are known quantities, so a little AI assistance with boilerplate goes a long way.
Deciding you need a new feature and just adding it is refreshing — e.g. I wanted a "read it later" feature like Feedbin's (something missing from Miniflux), and now I have it.
https://github.com/QuiteRSS/quiterss
Last update was 4 years ago; I don't know if this means the project is dead or merely "done." One of the last features added was the ability to share a news item to Hacker News:
https://github.com/QuiteRSS/quiterss/issues/1084#issue-33248...
I have used this app on Windows and macOS; I've installed it on Linux but I don't do daily work on Linux so I don't know if it's stable there or not.
It seems he has already completed it? I'll try to migrate this weekend then https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard/issues/1707#issueco...
I find the new tab page to be the ideal location for RSS feeds as I can quickly see new updates each time I open a new tab (which is quite frequently!).
It's on the Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/new-tab-widgets/ejn...
I already sync notes, e-books, etc, via syncthing on Android and Linux. RSS is one place where I have yet to find an option.
The RSS feeds are surprisingly non-standardized for the media content extensions, even a simple thumbnail.
[1] https://www.jasonthorsness.com at https://www.jasonthorsness.com/rss.xml
The only thing I miss is that I want it to keep an OPML file up-to-date so I can autosync it to a repo, but it doesn't, so I have to export the OPML file sporadically. It's acceptable.
- Linux support
- doesn’t make me click a link and load the video in the browser, but plays in app
Akregator on KDE Plasma doesn’t support this, but you’d think “video/podcast” support would be a feature listed in the bullets of the feed reader software. A lot of the readers I looked at did not have it listed on a quick glance.
I've switched to using Feedbin. I don't mind paying for it even though I could keep using Feedly for free, but the web UI ads annoyed me enough to look elsewhere.
The best Apple app is easily Unread, both for UI and UX. It still is t perfect for me, but the problems are minor and the author pleasant to interact with.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mela-recipe-manager/id15484660...
The author says they only found one browser extension that was a feedreader, that is not the case. So I'm posting here in case anyone else is looking for that type of solution.
I extended one to include opening rss subscribed reddit links in rtv in my terminal window, for example.
I've been using it for a few years and it's pretty great.
I'd probably honestly like to move to something self-hosted, but afaik there is no way to export the read status of individual feed items. OPML is just a list of feeds and their URLs, not their individual item history.
It has some features that I felt was missing from the terminal based readers out there already.
can't we just call things "A thorough examination / analysis" anymore?
Some folks seem to like it.
Keeps my feeds in sync between the mobile app and the web site, has pretty good keyboard shortcuts, mostly just gets out of the way, doesn't have ads I'm not sure what else I'd need
https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email https://pypi.org/project/rss2email/
i have been using this for 20 years already. by now my own version has accumulated a few custom patches. but the original it is still under active development/support. some day i need to submit my changes upstream.
Was surprised to see no mention of it here.
But I do have a wishlist of creature-comfort items that would probably never make it in:
* I go days/weeks without reading anything and trying to find out where I left off is a big pain. There doesn't seem to be a way to sort chonologicaly (only reverse).
* The only difference between read/unread items is a tiny gray dot in front of the article title. (I'd rather have the unread items stand out more from the read ones, with a different background, bold text, etc.)
* It would be nice to have a per-feed setting of whether to show the article as it appears in the RSS feed, or go fetch it from the web in reader mode.
I run it on a VPS so I can access it from phone+laptop and it looks great everywhere. I've only "augmented" it by throwing a basic rss bridge on the same server (well, the bridge is really single-file python script that generates rss feeds from other sources).
Since then, social sharing platforms are motivated to keep you on their platform. I recently ran an experiment on Facebook, where I posted a link to a content creator's video on YouTube with a lot of my thoughts about it.
I then downloaded the same video from YouTube and uploaded it to Facebook (this particular creator didn't upload his content to Facebook directly), and posted the exact same text content (but this time, hid the link the the source video in a comment).
The post where I downloaded + reposted the video got about 1000x more views than the one where I linked to the source.
On top of that, Facebook will often hide the link to the source video unless I click "Show all comments" (rather than the default "Show most relevant").
Facebook deprioritizes (shadowbans?) posts that link off of their platform, and it starts feeling like a stagnant pond. It's frustrating that it's difficult to share insightful blog posts on that platform, and I'm feeling pretty done with it.
Getting a good RSS reader isn't the part that I'm looking for -- I want the easy social aspect that Google Reader and Google+ gave me.
Re-posting / paraphrasing a comment I made in a discussion about decentralized recommendation algorithms for RSS feed content:
People used to post a "blogroll" (and sometimes an OPML file) to their personal blogs showing the feeds they followed. That was one way to do decentralized recommendations, albeit manually since there was no well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files. If there was a well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files a client could build a recommendation graph.
OMPL files in well-known locations would be neat but would only provide feed-level recommendation. Article-level recommendation would be cooler.
One of the various federated/decentralized/whatever-Bluesky-is "modern" re-implementations of Twitter/NNTP could be used to drive article-level recommendations. My feed reader could emit machine-readable recommendation posts based on ratings I give while browsing articles. My feed reader could consume these recommendations from others, and then lots of fun could be had weighting recommendations based on social graph, algorithmic summary of the article body, trustworthiness of the poster, friend-of-friend status, etc.
I thought about some of this stuff back in '05 when I tried to contribute to ttrss. The maintainer didn't have much interest so I dropped it. I've thought about it periodically but never had the initiative to do anything with it.
The fundamental problem with recommendation engines are the platforms are forcing content on the users based on what increases engagement (and possibly ad $) on their platform -- not what is valuable to the user.
If I'm following a particular blogger, and their signal to noise ratio is 9:1, if they recommend an article it would be vrey likely I am also interested in it. If I'm following a larger group of people, I may be interested, in aggregate, what they are interested in. All very basic stuff that seems to have been abused and forgotten. Other than e-mail, rss is the odd man out in 2025 which also makes it so much more valuable.
Any third party RSS feed service could ingest these feeds and spit out whatever other type of recommended feed they want. The could just view a hn/reddit style feed solely with counts of the people they want to follow along with "vote" counts and some decay algorithm. They could have a chronological feed that just shows everything. The users are in control again, not Meta/Facebook/IG, Reddit, Bytedance, or etc.
Feedbase lets you add RSS/Atom feeds so you can read them with your favourite newsreader:
It's very much inspired by the earlier web and more recently especially catalysed by the trend you note of the big sites punishing doors to elsewhere. I remember a time when Facebook actually had a "links" section where you could see a list of all the cool stuff you had posted, so it's sad they've strayed so far.
Join the resistance! Every tag and profile automatically has an RSS feed too, and I just recently added internal backlinks which I'm enjoying a lot.
maybe you have causation wrong. social platforms were so effective they caused downfall of old web, and with it the demise of Google Reader
That tells you that's not what it's for. It would be like posting your resume on FB and LinkedIn and then pointing out that FB led to fewer job offers than LinkedIn. Different platforms, different purposes.
Have you tried Feedly or Inoreader or Flipboard or The Old Reader or any other RSS services that popped up after Google Reader was killed?
Only insofar as the purpose of the platform is to generate ad revenue. The contents of the posts were semantically identical and they were made to the same platform; your example involves the same post to two different platforms.
In this case, I made two copies of the same post on the same platform. The only difference was whether the contents of the post were hosted on FB or if they were hosted on a competitor's platform.
It's not a question of medium (LinkedIn vs. Facebook). It's a question of algorithmic prioritization within the same platform.
Facebook deprioritizes my posts when I include hyperlinks to external websites -- I suspect especially if those sites don't run Meta ads.
It was the same video with the same text. The only difference was a hyperlink.
I want to support bloggers and content creators that I like (on a variety of platforms). Facebook skewed their algorithm to disproportionately show content hosted on their domains. I understand why they do that (advertising $$$ and "engagement" metrics) -- I just don't appreciate what it does to the user experience.
> Have you tried Feedly or Inoreader or Flipboard or The Old Reader or any other RSS services that popped up after Google Reader was killed?
Yes -- I tried Feedly and Inoreader. Maybe I should give The Old Reader a shot?
The feed-reading part of those clones is fine -- but again, what I miss is the sharing and discussion that could happen so easily within my social network with Google+ and Google Reader. The RSS piece is almost the least important piece for me.
Crucially, it syncs feed read state between my laptop and phone.
It currently only runs in Firefox but if anyone is interested, I'll Port it to Chrome since it now supports a sidebar interface.
I made this because I wanted to have feeds show up where I read them, in the browser, and I wanted it on my own device so nobody else controls it. No hosting, no payment, just a simple tool that lets me control what I read.
Bonus: if you try it you'll likely increase the global usage by double digits ;)
And follow the best practices: https://rachelbythebay.com/fs/help.html
Basically you don't want to hammer the server every minute or even every day if the feed updates once a week. Use ETags and Last-Modified properly.
I use Feedly, and generally like it, but the issue with RSS has very little to do with reader front ends and largely to do with how a lot of people don't publish full articles on RSS, images don't work, etc. The demo images of all the readers are like best case scenario - most non-personal sites only publish a paragraph or two, if that, making the reader more of a link aggregator.
While I started out just using the webapp, I quickly discovered that there large number of Miniflux compatible applications. I eventually settled on:
- Read You on my Android Phone and Tablet https://github.com/ReadYouApp/ReadYou
- Reactflux (web) on my windows laptop https://github.com/electh/ReactFlux
- RSSGuard on my linux desktop https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard
- Reeder classic on iPad (I already owned this, might as well keep using it)
- PoweReader on my work iPhone https://powereader.app/
One neat thing about Miniflux is that it supports a number of APIs, including Fever and Google Reader. As long as your frontend works with one of these, you get a seamless experience. This level of choice is actually something I'm really enjoying-- I get a very native experience on whatever platform I use, as opposed to using the Inoreader app/website on each platform.
> On October 3rd the maintainer announced that he's going to stop working on it, and will remove all infrastructure on November 1st. Forks of the project with other maintainers may pop up, but at the moment it's too soon to tell what the future of Tiny Tiny RSS will be.
https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/T...
I try to read everything on the internet via my reader so it is important to me that it:
1. can discover not so obvious feeds like youtube or reddit 2. makes rss feeds for non rss services — in the past it had feeds for twitter, vk and instagram that didn't provide feed. Sadly this is no longer a thing I beleive as such thing as social media public api dissappeared 3. can retreive full text of article
That said I believe you need to think of choosing of RSS reader as about choosing a mighty backend for the feeds. There is nothing difficult in rendering nice text from XML. Real difficulty is in making RSS avaliable on sites that are hostile to RSS (and will became more hostile in future).
And for the chosen backend, you can choose any frontend — just look at RSS apps in app store for your platform. Most of them will support using other backends. Reeder for Apple devices is nice.
https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS
https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds
My problem with most RSS do not have great search. With 500+ sources this can become problem.
https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - my own project
For all the (justifiable) concern about the death of RSS, we have a glut of excellent options for consuming content through RSS. But I'm still sour about the Reeder redesign. At least the dev was transparent about building the tool he wanted to use but, ugh, it's barely in the same market as the others now.
First, the newsboat DB is SQLlite so it's easy to access. I wrote a few scripts that built static HTML pages of all of the feeds along with a feed style page. I copied the HN page html/CSS, which to me feels like the maximum compact view while still being readable.
Now I have a bash script that will refresh all of the newsboat feeds and then open the static HTML page in the default web browser.
Thinking a lot about the impact of "vibe" coding recently made me wonder why anyone needs to be locked in to not just a set UI but any sort of rigid external control of how the user sees and interacts with information.
I want to see all my news chronologically. Now in a single place I have hn, lobste.rs, numerous twitter/x feeds, mastodon, and a lot of other blogs all visible chronologically. If someone was noisy I could apply keyword filters to the feeds and block certain things out. If I wanted to, I could put this on a server and access it through my phone.
This was definitely "the easy" way to do this. You could raise $1 million and do the same thing the hard way.
I absolutely love Vore (the rss reader, not the other thing!!!) It's really simplistic, and beautifully refuses to do anything I don't want it to.
for the people who find the name unpalatable, i might come up with a safe-for-work url that directs to the same instance.
I wanted to have a list of latest posts of blogs I follow and that I can access it quickly from both PC and mobile phone without any signing in. Then I decided to do it myself like that. There is a github workflow that runs automatically every 6 hours and updates that page.
Simon's spam game is CRAZY. There's a million blogs out there but over half of the posts on your reader are him. Why bother? You can't get away from him here or on lobsters even if you want to -- why further flood your subscriptions with his slop?
I don't understand how he has such a grip on you people. The Andrew Tate of AI bros.
Would be cool if lawnchair for android could integrate RSS as news feed..
Due to the nature of the medium, the majority of blogs in the directory and technical.
Check it out
I use the web client, and on iOS I use Reeder app to access Feedbin. Ben even published the a Feedbin API¹, which I wrote a Feedbin client for vintage computers (I called Mosaicbin)². I even use it for YouTube subs as of this year and it ingests them perfectly (and can filter Shorts).
I'm still on the original pricing but would happily pay $5/mo current price if it came to that. It's a product that would leave a huge void in my life if it ever disappeared.
I joined later than you: May 2013. If it really was 2012 when Google Reader blew up, I can't remember what I used before finding Feedbin. Maybe Feedly, maybe something else that came and went or maybe even a local reader...
For Android users, I recommend "Capy Reader" as a client.
I also use Reeder on iOS but am happy with the Feedbin web app on my Mac.
Feedbin is a service I'm 100% happy to pay for.
So my real question is what is the value of Lighthouse compared to Feedly or Inoreader?
I recently wondered how my perspective would change if I cut that out too. Would my understand of "what really happened" change? Would my worldview change? I already find myself disagreeing with "my" groups fairly frequently but still, I wonder what different conclusions I would come to if I just consumed the primary sources. Of course the source will matter ideally I could read a wide variety of sources on the same story.
For some reason I never thought about RSS. But its the perfect tool for the job.
However, this seems like an overwhelmingly NO:
>is one RSS feed with NYT headlines perhaps comprehensive enough that it is 90% functionally equivalent to a more voracious habit of reading diverse sources, subject matter expert blogs and so on?
The NYT, and pretty much all publications, reflect a singular editorial perspective. I think at minimum you would want 1 left, 1 right, and 1 center.
Yes, the design sounds _phpish_, but on Docker it's so reliable and fast, that I feel that I am in some sort of "final version of the software" and not needing anything else or enhancements, like WinRar, Notepad.exe, Winamp, Nero Burning ROM, Windows XP, etc.
I do not know if others have the same feeling about a software that works so great, that _any_ update will be a downgrade given the high level of contentment and satisfaction.
Couldn't agree more about the "final version" sentiment: my self hosted instance sat there for the first two years, untouched, working flawlessly and used daily. It's only when I switched server hardware that I actually performed an upgrade to the latest version, pleasantly surprised to find that there were no major changes (minor QoL patches only) and everything just worked.
The article makes a matrix out of the least important attributes of the product (free vs hosted) and has nothing at all to say about: (1) user interface and (2) architecture.
(2) of course puts constraints on (1) but gets you to the heart of the RSS predicament. It is possible in principle for an RSS reader to be completely stateless, that is you could make an HTML page with some JavaScript in it that reads an OPML file and then hits all those RSS feeds and formats them somehow. Or you could write some scripts that do the same with curl. [1]
The stateful system has a lot of advantages, particularly that the state never gets corrupted because it doesn’t exist. If you could add some simple and reliable layer that dealt with the worst of the polling problems with a cache then you could still stay pretty simple.
Past that though the architecture could get complex pretty quick in that you may want to reify feed items and store them in a database, keep track of whether you read something or not, run queries against the feed, run a recommender against the feed, etc.
[1] … if your cache mechanisms will protect you from polling some people’s RSS feeds too fast. Maybe you’re better off if they block you.
They do, just use `--etag-save` and `--etag-compare` and curl does proper caching, since 2020: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2019/12/06/curl-speaks-etag/
I have dabbled with replacing my RSS reader with something like this, but haven't done it, yet.
This is via iCloud and only works for iPhones/Macs. What’s great though is that NetNewsWire also supports RSS feed aggregators (I personally use FreshRSS) so that you can sync RSS read status over all your devices, even non Apple ones!
I’ve been tempted over the years to switch to other RSS apps, but this feature is what keeps me using NetNewsWire.
Really.
It’s flawless. It just works. There are no gimmicks, there is no weird effort to gamify it into a social media play, it’s just a user-focused news reader. And that’s great.
In addition to sync by iCloud, you can also sync with a third-party aggregator (BazQux, Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader, NewsBlur, The Old Reader, or FreshRSS). This can be a good option if you sometimes need access from a non-Apple device.
I suggested iCloud sync to Brent but was first rebuffed about the poor technical aspects and problems that it had. For those who remember the sentiment around that time was that iCloud sync was unreliable yet News Explorer was proof that it was working just fine.
Brent later backtracked for which I am very happy, I've been using NNW ever since.
I only wish it had RSS filtering to weed out the shitposts, I believe they're working on it. In the meantime I've been using Feed Rinse.
There was a period when it was not as useful, though, and I migrated away, but I still think of it very fondly.
My current RSS consumption toolchain uses Feedbin as the back end / syncing host, and their web app is good enough that I no longer use a native tool on my Mac. On my phone and iPad I use Reeder.
Works perfectly with a self-hosted FreshRSS backend.
But one day I want to look into alternatives, and the number one thing in my wishlist is to be able to scrap sites that crop the full article in the feed. Going from the RSS client to the browser to the reader mode in the browser is such an absurd friction.
Edit: Well, after 12 years, that day ended up being today. I found a client called FeedMe that syncs with Feedly and can load the full article inside the client. It also has some other features that I was looking for, like filters. There might be more clients like that, but this is the first I found. I shouldn't have been so lazy all this time.
The developer also set up their own instance of FiveFilters Full Text Rss (https://www.fivefilters.org/full-text-rss/) for use with that reader to do fetch the content. I typically use this as proxy for any feeds I'm going to add where the author didn't provide the full text.
Other than that: * The BazQux web interface has a button to fetch the full text content of the article. * As you noted, FeedMe on Android can also switch to web mode to fetch full content.
I prefer the Five Filters way because then I can go through my feeds offline while in transit
I've also built a bunch of RSS feed hydrators myself where the process of getting content to the feed isn't as simple as "grab that bit of the page".
Like my HN feed uses Opengraph information from the linked article to fill in a picture and preview as well as the Algolia HN api to get scores and comment counts.
That's exactly what some of the front ends help resolve - they parse the link to get the full content, some even for sites requiring login.
- Email is the one thing that isn’t tied to any platform and ~always works, so it’s worth it to put in some effort into managing subscriptions / filters / labels / etc knowing that they will pay off indefinitely.
- It’s nice to consume content in the original format intended by the author, so I prefer receiving an article link in the email with a preview, and clicking through to read it. A dedicated reader invariably has problems rendering non-text content and doesn’t have all the features of a browser.
> If `url` [optional] links to where you’re talking about a thing, then `external_url` links to the thing you’re talking about.
I'd be shocked if Atom/RSS didn't have equivalents.
This kind of "repost"-ish behavior may just be obscured in the tools people use to construct feeds, so they remain obscure features of the standards. The designers had syndication in mind, very much like what you're describing — ingesting feeds, reprocessing/mixing/extending them, and exposing the result as another feed.
Using RSS for this seems reasonable for people who already have the ability to host a feed. I was thinking more about the Twitter-alikes for the "normies" who don't have a place to host a feed. I don't just want to see recommendations from bloggers. I'd like to be able to pull recommendations from a wider net of "content consumers" as well as "content creators".
I can't come up with an economic model that would work to run a hosting service for feedreader-generated feeds except in the case of for-profit feedreaders. There's abhorrent models there like, say, peppering the recommendation feeds with "sponsored content", or extracting demographic data from the participants and selling it. Making the recommendation feed a fee-based service also seems like a bad model, too.
That was why I look at the Twitter-alikes for the recommendation feeds-- because the transport is "free" (or, at least, not something where I'd have to worry about the business model).
Well, yeah. I'm not surprised that they don't promote posts containing links to their competitors.
I wonder what the outcome would have been if you had instead linked to Instagram or Threads? I would guess those have a smaller penalty.
Probably a convo for a different place and time, but strong disagree here. Calibrating relative to political polarization is relativism, and I'm not a relativist.
How did you interpret the goal? Perhaps the widest range of topics? Most closely aligned editorial viewpoint?