Show HN: Feediary – RSS reader with zero tracking and zero ads | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Feediary – RSS reader with zero tracking and zero ads

feediary.com

109 pointsjustmarkup89 comments

If it's not an open-source client that I can run on my own machine, I wouldn't trust it.

There's nothing preventing a service from tracking you or giving away your data, no matter what reassuring words they use.

Which client do you use?

I've used Tiny Tiny RSS. Works well enough.

I use newsboat[1][2], an actively maintained fork of the excellent newsbeuter.

[1] - https://newsboat.org/

[2] - https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat

Something like devdocs.io as an RSS reader.

The internet must be a scary place for you then

The lack of free/native RSS readers on Android/iPhone and MacOS (Thunderbird only?) is a truly sad state of affairs. I don’t want social, I don’t want online sychronization with whateverNews, I don’t want smart, I don’t want premium - just let me subscribe to the bloody RSS’ URL.

This describes the web experience for me in general. All of these features sidestep the core functionality. People build these things and seem to ignore typography and clarity. Maybe it's because things like social and "smart" anything increase "engagement" and other such vanity metrics that are used to impress stakeholders, even though they have little to do with what the products should be good at, which is allowing people to read.

I quite liked Vienna (http://github.com/ViennaRSS/vienna-rss) while I had a Mac. It has options to run both as a standalone application and synced with various online services.

I like Reeder[0] and I use it since some time without problems.

[0]http://reederapp.com

On iOS there's a healthy selection of standalone apps I'd say, most of them offer support to sync with paid or self-hosted online services (If they support the Fever API). My current combination is a self-hosted Miniflux instance and Reeder on iOS and macOS as clients.

I wrote a little bit about it here: https://blog.notmyhostna.me/sad-state-of-rss-on-the-mac/ and there's a good discussion with other readers here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17577442)

Why would an RSS reader with zero tracking or ads be a selling point? Those are not things an RSS reader should have to begin with, it's like advertising that you made an offline garden planner without tracking or ads: that is the expected baseline.

This seems a pretty strong case of the "having X is bad, so not having X must be good" logical reasoning fallacy.

that is the expected baseline

I don’t know what world you’re living in, but that is absolutely not the expected baseline for consumer facing software in 2018 (unfortunately).

> I don’t know what world you’re living in, but that is absolutely not the expected baseline for consumer facing software in 2018 (unfortunately).

I don't know what world you're living in, but none of the "consumer facing" software I use has built-in tracking, including my RSS reader.

It's actually sad that apparently even the tech literate people on HN have given up and just accept that creepy corporate tracking is a way of life.

What's even more sad is that I know many people here work for companies that do this and they go along with it.

If you use an RSS aggregator like Feedly, Newsblur, The Old Reader, or Inoreader, it's safe to assume and expect they will track you. It's shitty and there is (was?) no real alternative.

The alternative is a paid reader with no ads.

That also works.

I know, which is I don't use any of those.

The alternative is to not use shitty web apps.

What then? Do I have to maintain my own RSS aggregator server so I can read my feeds on multiple devices? Or do I have to restrict myself to a single device?

Feedbin is open source. Wouldn’t be difficult to get that running for a cheap box on DO or whatever.

Congratulation on shipping it!

I definitely share the same values, so much that I developed a very similar Open Source RSS feed reader with the exact same requirements in mind (no tracking, no ads, no BS...).

https://feedsubs.com (https://github.com/NicolasLM/feedsubs)

Thank you!

your RSS reader looks good, keep up the good work!

I'd definitely consider at least putting a screenshot on the front page, or in the Github readme. I clicked your link very interested, saw nothing but a Sign Up button and then an (almost) empty Github readme, and lost interest.

Oh, I was excited when I read this...but there's no screenshot or demo. In any case, kudos for building something open source!

I’d just like to second that. I get gp built for gp, but if you want others to take interest...

I went to put in the OPML and I got a 500 error after I pressed the button.

In the 5 years I've used BazQux reader, I've never once had an ad injected, never received a single promotional email, and if they are tracking me, they are doing an amazing job of hiding it.

Fantastic software that I am proud to support.

bazqux.com

Thank you for the kind words!

Clickable link https://bazqux.com

Actually BazQux Reader removes some simple tracking like 1x1 pixel images/iframes and filters out images containing ".ads.", "feedads", "google-analytics" and few more common ads/tracking sites. I've implemented it many years ago when tracking fighting wasn't mainstream mostly to improve reader speed.

I'm also planning to implement image proxy to make everything HTTPS (no mixed HTTP/HTTPS content) and to resize overlarge images (speed again) and thinking to add proxying of audio & video too. So site owners would not know that you've loaded anything from them at all.

The only thing that BazQux Reader tracks is feature usage: Add/remove subscription/star/unstar/tag/search/share/etc. And only fact of usage is tracked, no details (e.g., no records of what article was starred/shared, only fact that star/share was used). It helps me to get statistics of overall reader usage but of course I don't plan to sell it (and I don't think that anybody needs it).

BazQux Reader gets its money directly from clients. It's plain stupid to sell data of client paying $20-$30 a year for .000001 cent and loose all the trust (and money and self-respect).

I also use and enjoy BazQux. It's fast and supports vi-like keybindings.

Let me suggest to come up with a different hook. Lack of tracking and lack of ads are two of the fundamental defining (anti)characteristics of RSS. The whole point of RSS is to directly connect individual content providers to individual content consumers. This current hook is like trying to sell pillows on the basis that they don't spontaneously explode.

Well, feedly does inject ads so it is a thing.

slack x 10000000

It is a thing, and it makes feedly a bad application. "Not having ads" does not make your RSS reader good, it just makes it "not doing something bad and frankly, plain stupid". Not having trackers or ads is a given, in the same way your coffee maker doesn't come with tracking or ads, and you should go "uh, what? no thanks I'll use something else, this is ridiculous" when you find a coffee maker that does. Selling your coffee maker as "doesn't have tracking or ads!" just tells us your product has nothing else worth talking about.

Agreed. This reminds me of those products in the grocery store with "produced locally" on them. If that's the best you can say about something, it must be really bad.

Hello, thank you for your feedback. Yes, we do show ads in the Free version, there is always Feedly Pro with no ads. Ads in the Free version help us fund new projects and the infrastructure.

That's what paid pro accounts are for. Your product is good enough to merit people giving you money, which lets you develop the features that pro user benefit from, and free users get a taste of, to convince them to switch to a pro account.

Ads as your kickstarter in the absence of a pro account user base? Sure, if you have no other capital to work with, go for it. Still ads even after you have a pro account system in place generating cashflow? Now you're just being bad human beings.

I tried it out for a bit and compared to my current reader of choice this is what I miss:

- keyboard navigation

- expanded view (full content in the list view)

Some other remarks:

- The pricing is a bit high for me, for a couple € more I could run my own virtual server (which could also be used for many other things) with an opensource feed reader.

- Do Not Track is a nice addition but it would be better to proxy the images through your service instead of removing them altogether.

- The feed crawler should handle last modified and etag headers to save bandwidth both for yourself and the content providers (it could also use a proper user agent with a subscriber count in it).

Hey,

thanks for your feedback!

Keyboard shortcuts will be added in the next release (next week), and expanded view in the Reader is also planned and will be added in some of the next releases.

Also thanks for the other remarks, we will not decrease the price as this is the minimum to ensure the service is sustainable. Will definitely think about the image proxy and the etag headers.

https://freshrss.org/ FTW!

As an aside. I absolutely hate sites that only send a partial RSS feed, showing only the first paragraph or what have you.

I know the logic, entice me enough to click through, serve ads etc. but 90% of the time I won't, unless I am really interested, but MOST of all, I fly for nearly 30% of my week. First thing I do before boarding is updating my feed, not being able to access full content has had me unsubscribe to a whole bunch of sites in frustration.

/rant

I recommend https://tt-rss.org/ It is quite easy to self host

Oh all these "feed readers". Long ago, I discovered you can just send feeds to email. Once your feed is emailed to you, you can save it, forward it, read on the web, tablet, phone. Search it like a boss, and more. I use IFTTT by the way.

Another alternative that's free (they also have a paid hosted version), open source, fast and written in Go: https://miniflux.app

Well, NewsBlur gives you all that and is open source too. It's also less expensive if you use the hosted version ($36/yr for NewsBlur vs 48€ for feediary).

I have a strong feeling I tried newsblur before and didn't like it so there might still be room for a couple of RSS readers.

(No this is not a jab at newsblur, it might be an excellent product just like other things I don't personally like. My point is only there is room for more products.)

Personally I use Feedbro which I find excellent:

- works nicely (well, I had to restore my opml a couple of times) but when it works I really like it

- no login. No account.

- runs locally as a Firefox extension

It is not open source though as far as I can see.

Imagine saying this about a native application like it's some special feature. Web 'apps' are terrible in so many ways.

Native applications (on mobile) have both in droves.

Yeah, everything on mobile is terrible. Both web and native. That's why I've chosen to never use smart phones.

But using a feed reader on a mobile device is kind of silly anyway. It's not like you can do any serious reading or work on a mobile computer.

Why would you think native applications do not track you? They do. And they have way more insight into your world then a web app.

What exactly is a native app going to 'track'? It has zero access to your browser.

A native app on windows have full access to your computer and can track just about everything from what you click in the app to passwords entered in other apps and websites.

Thats more of an advert for not using Windows than not using Native Apps.

It's not really Windows-specific; both Windows and macOS have sandboxes to prevent that behavior, but both allow you to download and run unsandboxed applications.

When you open the app, when you close it, which button you press, which device you are on, which ip address this device is using ... there's a whole lot of things that fall under the general term "tracking".

There can be arguments made about if this is good/bad/neccessary/terrible/etc. but it's easily possible and done all the time.

Google Analytics makes it easy for example: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

While I can see some wouldn't accept that level of information gathering, most of that doesn't tell the app author much.

It's not like a web-app that uses GA, which in turn means google's internal profile of you shows another app you use/etc.

The creepy level tracking that GA is possible of in a browser isn't quite there in a native app - there's no intrinsic data storage system like cookies that's shared between all native apps and sent automatically with http requests.

I suppose it can read/write the browser's cookie database whenever the browser isn't running -- or maybe even when it's running, I don't know. That would enable using Google Analytics just as if it was a webpage.

Do not forget that native code running locally is at least as powerful as X, for almost any X that you can use on your computer. (The only thing that's more powerful than that, is native code running locally as root.)

Really? I thought browsers encrypt their user data & such with some type of user credentials?

Suppose that's the case. How does the browser get the credentials? It's probably not from the user, because I never heard of a browser that requires a password at startup. It could be from the OS, but native "apps" aren't sandboxed, nor are they signed, so the OS has no way of differentiating between 2 apps.

> nor are they signed

macOS apps are increasingly signed, because there are additional steps a user must take to run unsigned apps.

Chrome on Windows encrypts the passwords using the Windows encryption functionality, which is tied to the user's account. Any software running on the same account can decrypt them.

Oh ok, so but in chrome, I have to type my windows password to reveal my saved password. Can a native.exe app do that without requiring me to type my windows password?

Yes; Chrome doesn't actually use that password you type for anything, it just checks if it's correct - the function literally returns a single boolean. As soon as you're logged into your Windows account, they are available. In fact, if it wasn't so, Chrome would have to ask you for the Windows password for every form it wanted to fill with a password.

I just had a look at my macOS firewall (Hands Off) and can count at least 15 seemingly-native apps being blocked from accessing www.google-analytics.com.

And you have no easy and straightforward way to check or block the requests an application is doing. I don’t know why people assume that applications are less malicious than webapps e.g. Tinder software update takes good couple 100's of MB of mobile data, their image swiping module must have some rocket science happening.

This is neat. Can I pay a one time fee to run the service myself? Just a simple container or package of some sort.

This seems like a neat product, but it’s better for me as a user to pay some amount once than 4/month forever. I want to encourage you to keep building the software, but have to keep my list of monthlies really small.

Thank you very much.

We are thinking about offering a lifetime membership plan, but need to figure out the details first. How much would you be willing to pay for a lifetime licence?

What I would like to see is a membership where the price drops each year.

First year, it's $5/month. Second, it's $4. Third year, it's $3. And so on. Ideally it's free year 6 and from then on as long as you have an active account. But it could be $1/year.

I already have enough things I have to pay for every month for the rest of my life.

What happens if signups dry up? Those $180 won't last forever if you expect hosting, support and/or new developments.

A service that has a non zero operating expense (which is, pretty much everyone) cannot survive if there is no revenue from users to support that OPEX (IT/cloud costs, dev pay, etc).

You need recurrent money to run the business. It comes from ads/tracking/data and/or from subscriptions. Some business want to protect your privacy by not tracking you or serve you ads, so you should expect a non zero recurrent cost.

It can be extremely small, but it needs to be there to be profitable: the business has to cover its costs somehow, or it won't last.

> I already have enough things I have to pay for every month for the rest of my life.

So does this business to provide a service to you, for as long as you remain a customer.

The software industry goes back decades and has solved this problem. Microsoft still makes a lot of money selling one time licenses (and other stuff).

Regarding ideas on how to charge, I like how https://sketchapp.com handles this. Instead of charging $799 like the old Adobe Photoshop days, they charge a lower one-time price that receives updates for a year. You can choose to stay at that price or upgrade. You also don't need to back pay for years you skip if you choose to upgrade again.

One problem I have with that is if a designer sends me a file in a newer version I have to upgrade even if they didn’t use a new feature. Photoshop at least let’s you save in compat mode. So I’m basically forced to keep buying the newest version even though I use it maybe a few times a year. Not worth the price IMO.

I agree with those points. It may not be best for Sketch (design software) I was more referring to the licensing model, to offset the high lifetime price, that may put off someone buying.

Don't get me wrong, I'm fine with yearly subscriptions. I happily pay for newsblur for example.

Depending on the product, this model could be problematic - should you provide ongoing security updates beyond the paid period?

If no, then a big chunk of your installbase is going to be insecure. Some people might feel that's unethical, or too much of a bad press worry.

If yes, then you need to patch a growing number of branches with libaries that might make breaking changes requiring re-writes in your code.

I guess Microsoft ran into this problem when the End Of Lifed windows XP.

That said, for someone who just has an app they are writing and wants to make a little money, it's probably overthinking.

I think it’s definitely a valid point and worth considering in the current reality of software development.

Ok, I'll give it a go. Haven't really used any since Digg Reader closed.

> Gets super interested.

> Opens website and sees subscription based model

> no thanks.

Always happy to see a new reader. My only quibble is with the name - is it like diary or apiary?

Did anyone use it? Is it any good?

Why there is no demo to try but it forces me to create an account?

How does it compare to yoleo, for example?

Is RSS still alive? I'm asking this out of curiosity. I've stopped using RSS long time ago. It has nothing to do with Google Reader. I've stopped using RSS before Google Reader died.

What are you using instead? Facebook and Instagram?

There are certain technologies that are no longer considered sexy, but are extremely powerful for people who select the right tools and invest a little time in learning how to get the most out of them.

Text editors like vim and emacs; email clients like mutt; NNTP clients and text-only Usenet groups; RSS feed readers...

In 2018 it is reasonably hard to find RSS feeds. There are no good directories, people are not sharing their OPML files (not in articles nor <link> elements)

Finding smaller websites in 2018 is even harder. There are no good directories, people are not sharing their favorite websites but if they do their audience is so microscopic that it doesn't reach you.

I sort of ended up building my own box of tricks. Talking about those mostly generates feedback from the RSS oblivious who moan about RSS being dead and praising the glory of walled gardens that have some laughably inferior news implementation. (I'm not complaining, if not an accurate description it is an understatement)

The way I see it I would prefer to glorify with my subscription the (perhaps low audience) websites that really deserve it. People who worked to write and record things I'm interested in and ran that extra mile to make it informative.

But who cares about that if you can have the fcebook and twitter type of walled echo chambers?

It is not so much that RSS is dying. Why even make a website if you cant find readers for it? Arguably the whole concept of a website is changing from providing information for free to hard-sell commerce.

That said, while it is certainly getting more difficult every year to find new subscriptions, it can be done.

If you continue to put in the effort to find more you will reach a sweet spot where the number of dead feeds matches the number of new finds. One week you will be very happy with the results the next might be a sad display of the large older news outlets. It may give the impression of slow death.

It is rather weird... do you just delete feeds that don't work? Do you crawl the dead list every week? How long does it have to be dead before you purge it? Did it just move? Is the website it self still there? How valuable is its content to you?

Then, to repeat myself, since everyone and their mum is pretty much locked into walled gardens there is this huge echo chamber effect where, much like TV in the 80's, everyone is talking about the same topics. Trying to filter those out feels like reanimating a corps.

However: It continues to be worth it to find original thought. If I have to crawl the entire internet to find that last blogger who isn't parroting Ruppert Murdoch or Donald Trump ~ I will.