Comment by unicornporn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unicornporn | Hacker News Reader

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I don't understand why you would ever want this to be a desktop app. Try FreshRSS[1], it's awesome. It works well on shared hosting and it runs on SQLite.

TTRSS only gave me trouble. Threw all kinds of strange errors at unexpected times. I don't know how many times it died on me after an upgrade. I eventually gave up and found FreshRSS. Been running (and updating) it over a year, without a single problem.

One of the best things about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.

Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use https://twitrss.me/ to follow users. If you don't find a feed, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/).

[1] https://freshrss.org

> I don't understand why you would ever want this to be a desktop app.

Perhaps because the vast majority of people in the world have no interest in figuring out web hosting so they can read some news articles. That doesn't seem like a viable way to "bring back RSS".

Exactly. And a lot of people still spend tons of time in what amounts to a standard desktop environment. I switched from cloud audio players to QMMP and have been looking to do the same with RSS.

It seems likely that the average user (that has no interest in figuring out web hosting) will still want to use software/service that works across devices (just like everything else works these days). For those users there's https://newsblur.com/ and similar services.

> I don't understand why you would ever want this to be a desktop app.

I thought you were going to say that it needs to be a website+mobile app for maximum adoption, and I was ready to say that you have a point but full-weight desktop apps still have their place. Then I looked up FreshRSS, and it's an aggregator that you host yourself?

Any answer to the question "how can we get more regular users to adopt a service" that starts "first, they all need to install Apache..." is very doomed.

Isn't Apache installed by default on at least all desktops nowadays? Obviously, people should be expected to tinker with httpd.conf, but something fully automated running on top of Apache isn't beyond imagination - and the installation could even be handled automatically if required.

When you say all desktops, are you including Windows and OSX in this?

OSX is the only desktop OS I have recent experience with; consider that question a genuine one rather than a rhetorical one!

Is Apache installed by default on Windows and MacOS? I find that very hard to believe :)

Also, regular users tinkering with httpd.conf? Really?

It is on MacOS. And read my comment again - I agree that expecting users to tinker with httpd.conf is ridiculous.

Is there a typo, maybe? Your previous comment says "Obviously, people should be expected to tinker with httpd.conf", emphasis mine.

Grrr - that explains the misunderstanding! Thanks :)

Hey, I couldn't tell, maybe you enjoy self-flagellation. Maybe you tinker with sendmail.cf and .fvwmrc for fun :p

It's not installed on Windows by default, so far as I know.

100% agree with self-hosting an RSS aggregator. It's awesome.

Personally, I gave tt-rss and FreshRSS a shot, but went back to Miniflux[1]. One binary to run (written in Golang) and plugs into Postgres. Easy to set up, but I prefer Miniflux for the same reasons I prefer Hacker News' website—simple and functional.

[1] https://miniflux.net/

Since I'm considering to switch from TTRSS to something else, may I drill a bit? (the website is a tad short)

I heavily rely on nested categories in TTRSS (Youtube -> News for news channels for example), while the website says it has categories, can they be nested?

And most importantly, does miniflux handle about 700 feeds well? It would help a lot if I could lower the update rate of some feeds that only update once a month...

No nested categories. They're all flat. Miniflux is ultra minimalist and "opinionated," which I ended up preferring to all the others. YMMV! If you're looking for a ton of features or customization, look elsewhere.

It's also wicked fast, resource-light, and the code is really easy to grok if you want to hack in anything. But, the update rate is a single global setting[1]. I wouldn't be surprised if it could handle far more than 700 feeds... you'll hit bottlenecks from bandwidth or the DB before anything with the app.

[1]: http://docs.miniflux.net/en/latest/configuration.html

>YMMV! If you're looking for a ton of features or customization, look elsewhere.

I don't need much customization, I simply rely on a lot of features for daily convenience. Either way, it seems good enough and I might be able to work around it (or submit a patch if I'm not lazy).

Update rate is merely a concern because I don't want to spam some hosts with repetitive updates for no reason, might be worth another patch.

Way way too complicated, needs a setup and configured postgres install, why use an RDBMS when it could have embedded sqlight and avoided all that sysadmin stuff

Agreed, this seems like a perfect fit for SQLite. It's not like you need massive concurrency, and you would have avoided all this administrative burden. Too bad, that's literally the only reason I chose not to try it. FreshRSS seems very nice too, but is also a hassle to deploy (what with apache/nginx and a bunch of requirements).

Deployment difficulty is why I wrote my own: https://github.com/rcxdude/nobsrss . It's super easy to deploy, but it's super minimal (unlike the way a lot of people seem to use RSS, I just use it for notifications, so all I need is a link to the actual website).

Huh, that's pretty cool, although I'd like it if it marked items as read when I clicked on them. You can easily achieve that by adding a URL route to read an item, and when a user visits that, you mark it as read and redirect to the real URL.

> […] you would have avoided all this administrative burden.

This is the big reason I chose FreshRSS. PHP and SQLite works great on cheap/shared hosting and is portable.

Fun fact, Stream is almost entirely written in Go. Winds is based on Node/React. I think it's nice as it enables more people to contribute. (everyone knows JS)

> TTRSS only gave me trouble. Threw all kinds of strange errors at unexpected times. I don't know how many times it died on me after an upgrade.

Counterpoint: I never had any issues with it and updates are just git pull, maybe login with the admin account for db migration, restart the update daemon, no issues at all.

Same here. Some years ago I switched from Thunderbird on several machines to a self-hosted TT-RSS that vastly improved my (professional) RSS feed browsing. Some minor annoyances with the scrolling when the RSS items are long but overall great experience.

> Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter.

I use https://feedbin.com as a RSS backend to any client I can imagine (Reeder on iOS in my case). Feedbin recently introduced a feature that treats and presents twitter searches/users/tags as RSS feed and extracts media and links in tweets. Right along all your other RSS feeds: https://feedbin.com/blog/2018/01/11/feedbin-is-the-best-way-...

I think it's a brilliant addition to the service.

Last week I discovered Cappuccino [1] (macOS and iOS app).

* Interface is native,

* Free, with some (paid) premium options,

* 3 visualization options (preview, web, browser),

* Import and export your OPML configuration,

* Native desktop notifications,

* Premium daily email summaries,

* Premium push notifications.

It was also recently released on May 7, 2018.

[1] http://cappuccinoapp.com

https://readkitapp.com/ is still a much better client in my opinion. For now Cappuccino can't even load the entire article in cases when feed has only an excerpt.

Not free, but no subscription either.

Awesome, just what I needed. Thanks!

The TwitRSS thing sounds awesome. It would be pretty easy to setup a web hosted version of Winds so people can access it however they want. Anything you particularly like about FreshRSS?

> Every service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter.

To me Twitter is an RSS feed—at least this is the way I use it.

Since Google Reader retired, I've moved to www.netvibes.com

I forgot all about Netvibes.com! I remember setting up a personal dashboard with my emails, news, Digg, etc way back in ~2006. It may very well have been my first foray into RSS, now that I think about it...

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