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.
I’m using Feedly Classic on iOS. I would like to move off of it, but I have yet to find any other RSS client which presents the articles in a card like view which you can vertically swipe through to mark them as read.
Feedly themselves abandoned this UI for an infinite scrolling list on their main app. All other RSS clients I tried have this similar UI, which I feel is really poor.
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
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 have Smart Mobile Menu, Mobile Scroll Menu and Touch 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 AutoTTL processes 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-newsletter
There’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-feeds
Freshrss and ReadYou
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!
