Hacker News Reader

Comment by allanbreyes | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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)

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