Hacker News Reader

Comment by iscrewyou | Hacker News Reader

Which RSS reader do you use?

I use a terminal RSS reader called newsboat[1][2], which is an actively developed fork of newsbeuter.

It's pretty feature rich, fast, keyboard-oriented (supporting vi movement keys), and works great in the terminal.

Another great thing about it is that it runs completely on my own machine, so I don't have to give away information about my reading preferences to any third party, as would be the case for any hosted RSS service.

I love RSS because it gives me lean, fast, ad-free, bloat-free information. I hope it never dies.

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

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

I love newsbeuter, it's how I get all latest news about the death of RSS :)

Feels like there has been a bit of a resurgence lately, not that I have any hard data to back that up. The major players ie google and now apple have dumped it, but most blogs and news sites still have rss feeds.

RSS has always been the best way to follow multiple webcomics. I'm not sure why it seems so little-known in that world.

Definitely. If a comic doesn't have an RSS feed, I won't keep up with it. It isn't worth keeping track of the different update schedules and platforms.

It has always been a "people's choice" sort of thing, a least for a certain slice of "people".

Large media outfits tend to hate RSS because it puts curation in the hands of users, and that curation function is what a lot of people will pay a lot of money to influence.

Smaller media outfits like it, because they can find readers without paying money to influence the large gatekeepers.

As blogging has "matured", the big shops are feeling more confident that they can lock folks back in to their curation.

Ironically its the large media outlets that usually have categorical and comprehensive rss feeds, presumably by virtue of being around during the peak google reader years when rss was expected and not bothering with purging the functionality.

It's the upstart outlets that I notice not having RSS at all, with a twitter handle in its place. Pass for me.

Google News still has RSS feeds.

Search for what you want, click "News", scroll to the bottom of the page and create an alert.

Then you can select "RSS feed" to get a custom feed for your search terms or news topic.

https://imgur.com/dn4OQCX

When I follow a site via RSS, I go out of my way to reach out to the owner and let them know I am enjoying their content via RSS.

If I site I want to follow doesn't have RSS, I reach out and let the owner know I can't follow their site via RSS. A few people implemented RSS on their blogs because of it :)

Thank you. That makes a lot of sense!

In terms of most blogs still having RSS, I suspect that's primarily due to default software settings.

Big fan of newsboat. I still run freshrss on a pi just for use on mobile and starting certain article s.

I'm ... mostly ... a fan.

Though I'd very much prefer a linebreak between index listings as a bit of contextual segregation / clausterphobia breaking.

I also find search ... nonintuitive.

Though on balance, it's pretty slick.

By the original newsbeuter author, rsstail and multitail are also damned slick. I've got an rsstail script (with a lot of pretification / scrubbing of the feed streams) that runs as an xrootconsole window on my desktop, alternating amongst various feeds.

Not the OP, but https://bazqux.com/ is very nice.

Is there a self-hosted RSS reader that does feed de-summarization, like BazQux seems to do?

The only one I know is: https://fivefilters.org/content-only/

It works for all the major sites but it is paid but with self-hosting option.

I think Newsblur [0] can do it but self hosting it is pretty involved.

[0]: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

Since this seems to be the thread where everyone mentions the RSS feed reader they use/write, I'll share Brook. It's a very minimal feed reader that gives you what you need and gets out of the way.

You can use it in Firefox right now, and if anyone is interested, I'll port it to Chrome. Honestly I wrote it because my old favorite feed reader Sage wasn't supported after Firefox switched to the web extensions standards.

Give it a peek if you either want to see how it works, or you just want a simple way to browse your favorite sites in your browser.

Source: https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook

Plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re...

(Okay, now let's get back to the regularly scheduled outrage around the decline of RSS and maybe mention how Google doesn't support its products anymore ;) )

Just going to pimp https://theoldreader.com/ which mimics the old Google Reader UI down to the shortcuts. I don't think I could live without it and gladly pay my yearly membership for the premium version even if I don't actually need it.

Inoreader is my choice. If you pay for it, you can also feed email newsletters/press releases into it, and follow Twitter/Facebook pages

Been using inoreader since Google Reader died. Great service which I found this page from :)

https://github.com/wking/rss2email

Just sends the latest articles to an IMAP folder. I can use any device that syncs to my email (currently using the built in ActiveSync client on Android), and can access it from webmail, and via Thunderbird on Linux.

I have a script run rsstail via cron to catch updates and email it to Gmail for reading/review

Email is HTML formatted how I want, and Gmail will probably not be deprecated any time soon.

https://github.com/flok99/rsstail

Not the OP, but I've never found anything faster than the Livemarks plugin for quickly scanning headlines from all of your favorite sites with a quick mouseover in your browser's bookmark toolbar.

Livemarks (or the Chrome/Vivaldi equivalent 'Foxish live RSS') was released after Firefox killed off their Live Bookmarks feature a year or so ago.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live-rss/jp...

https://feedly.com/ is the best web-based reader today. Mobile app also works great.

I recommend News Explorer. It has seamless sync between the Mac and iOS version via iCloud.

I use Feedly. I subscribe (paid) to Apple News +. I wish I could read thru Feedly.

I use Reeder 3 on iOS and NetNewsWire on Mac. NetNewsWire is a free and open source RSS reader. An iOS version (also free) is coming in the first quarter of 2020.

Newsblur

Fresh RSS is my favorite. It is self hosted and has apps for mobile.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com