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 use Feedly, it has a nice iOS client too. It has some nice integrations for saving articles for later reading
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.
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.
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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.
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
Nextcloud News with the accompanying app on my phone. I was lazy that day
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.
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i like commafeed the best. webapp on android just works
Try the iOS app Unread: An RSS Reader. I use a self-hosted FreshRSS instance with API access enabled as the Unread app uses the Fever API (see link below). The Unread app typography is absolutely beautiful. I use the app without a subscription as it’s expensive but given how great it is, I’m considering subscribing to support continued development.
https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_Fever_API.html
FreshRSS backend and Lire (iOS)
Love it! Well worth the app purchase I couldn’t be happier with my setup.
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.
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
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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.
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!
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.
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’m using inoreader, the free tier is enough for my usage
