Ask HN: What RSS Reader do you use?
It's time for me to use an RSS reader again after 6 years of not using one. I used Feedly back in the day, but I wonder what I should use now.
What RSS reader do you use?
What RSS reader do you use?
https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/
Here is their "How to Support NNW" page. https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/T...
Suppose you want feeds from website A, but don't want certain stories tagged with "mice", or titles containing "epistemology", and you only want to see articles published by an author named "Joyce Smith", you can do that.
It's pretty great. Reading RSS feeds has become so much more pleasurable. The articles that do make it past the training filters are almost always what I do like to read.
[1]: https://newsblur.com
1. No-nonsense web UI. Simple, fast, logical, intuitive. 2. No ads 3. Decent free tier 4. Great intelligence trainer 5. Good search (finally!) 6. Pre-caching news content on your mobile device (great Android client by the way!) so when it comes to reading content, it comes up instantly.
€36/annum feels a bit steep (it used to be €12/annum when they started as far as I remember) but it works for me.
How is allowing feeds from a particular site a "feature"? They actually had to do extra work to block those feeds for the free tier.
Maybe Gmail should add a paid feature to allow email from Amazon.
Reddit has RSS. Here is an example - http://old.reddit.com/r/all.rss . To subscribe to it, you need to pay 12 dollars per month to Feedly. And this I think is scammy.
I need to figure out if there is an export feature, though. I'd like to try some of the other options listed here.
Does exactly what I want and no extra jazz
The only feature that I would like it per-folder scan tracking (Mark items as read when you scroll past them). It is currently system wide based on the View types (magazine, list, etc.)
Used TheOldReader.com when Google killed Reader, then switched to inoreader. Haven't looked back (even though I'm using the free version still).
edit: Adding that I find the android app to be of excellent quality.
Makes it easy to spot some articles just by scanning for an highlighted word.
I bought multiple years of "Supporter" level while it was cheap and some features I like were moved into a more expensive tier, and I'm glad I did because the features are grandfathered in until I need to renew.
This thing is packed with features, yet simple to use. Not only is it the best RSS reader I've ever used, it's up there in the top 10 of all software, of any kind, I've ever used.
Things I love about it (from [2]):
> Miniflux is a minimalist software. The purpose of this application is to read feeds. Nothing else.
> The Miniflux layout is optimized to scan entries quickly.
> The design of Miniflux is inspired by Hacker News, Lobsters and Pinboard.
> Miniflux uses Javascript only where it’s necessary.
And the content extraction for truncated feeds, customizable with CSS selectors, is an absolute killer feature that I use heavily.
I'm very happy to pay an annual subscription fee and I haven't looked back once since I started using it. I'm eagerly waiting for NetNewsWire to add support for the Fever API[3] so that I can use it with Miniflux. But the web UI on mobile is good enough to be honest.
[1]: https://miniflux.app
[2]: https://miniflux.app/opinionated.html
[3]: https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/issues/76
Certainly not perfect, but it fits my needs and doesn't cost anything. Also has an Android app, so I can easily check my feeds whenever I want.
[1]: https://community.tt-rss.org/t/a-category-named-gas-chamber/...
I don’t like twitter but sometimes that’s the only way people communicate or share their art. Inoreader lets me add twitter users with a filter (e.g not interested in tweets without pictures (artists), not interested in retweets, only interested in tweets that contain ‘released’, ‘beta’ or ‘rc’ (software).
Really cool for trimming down the noise and a smooth, clean experience.
I'm a sucker for mindlessly checking feeds, so I only poll feeds every few hours to avoid a drip-drip of new posts throughout the day. I do this with a cron job (now a systemd service). This job also converts RSS and ATOM to maildir, since that's all mu4e supports.
It turns out there are loads of programs for polling+downloading+caching+converting news feeds, but I couldn't find any that just convert; so I made my own by stripping down one of those existing projects ( http://chriswarbo.net/git/feed2maildir ).
Please list a few. They might come in handy.
I know of feed2exec (programmable feed reader): https://gitlab.com/anarcat/feed2exec
Debian also has feed2imap, feed2omb (open microblogging) and feed2toot (Mastodon): https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=feed2
Prior to that I was using imm https://hackage.haskell.org/package/imm-0.3.0.0 Looking at it's github repo it seems to have morphed into a more general-purpose tool https://github.com/k0ral/imm
I also remember looking at https://github.com/sloonz/maildir-feed and its successor https://github.com/sloonz/ua which looks nice and modular, but I couldn't figure out how to compile Go with Nix :(
I enjoy it enough I actually pay for a yearly subscription for the advanced features (see: https://feeder.co/pricing).
with Reeder on my iPhone.
Miniflux like so many supports the Fever API which means I can use almost any RSS app on the platform I need it on. I also wrote a small sidekick for Miniflux that I can use to filter posts I don't like (Sponsored posts etc.): https://github.com/dewey/miniflux-sidekick
Miniflux is great, small, single-binary, easily configured with envvars and just gets out of the way. Gets good development and feels great. I don't use a specific reader - just webapp on whichever platform, works well.
Unread also does an Instapaper-like reader view which you can turn on feed-wide for those shitey RSS feeds that only give you the excerpt.
It's an active fork of the venerable terminal RSS reader, newbeuter.
I like it because it works in the terminal, is feature rich, and it's standalone.
[1] - https://newsboat.org/
Switched and started paying when Reader shut down, haven't regretted it.
I use the pay version because I have so many feeds but I suspect that's more a sign that I have a problem.
The 64 free sites should be enough.
[1]: https://retool.com/ [2]: http://cocoacake.net/apps/fiery/ [3]: https://feedafever.com/api
It's an extension by kickscondor, with some great opinionated UI choices.
Adding a new feed is neither user friendly, nor obvious, but it's nice to not need an extra program to read feeds.
It is perfectly acceptable to me that neither functionality is easy to work with, because in return I get all my non-instant messaging in just one application.
I'd probably really like it if it was possible to interact with WhatsApp and possibly Slack inside Thunderbird as well.
The summary of Thunderbird basically.. It has like all the features imaginable, and the core ones are done ok-ish, but after years of using it I still feel like throwing it out every now and then because of all the weirdness and quirks and straight-up bugs.
> but it's nice to not need an extra program to read feeds.
Agreed. It's also nice to have the ability to search everything, I sometimes forget where I read something.
One thing I wish it could do is take a standard web page (HTML) and allow me to build a feed out of it. Or at the least keep any eye on the page and tell me when it changes.
I use the Reeder app on iPad and iPhone to interface with Feedbin.
Not trying to be a shill, just love the service! :)
We have some new updates planned over the next few months and hopefully you (and the parent comments) enjoy them!
Feedbin account linked to NetNewsWire on my iPad, iPhone and Mac. I chose Feedbin because it is 1. A paid subscription, I forgot what I paid, but $50/year I want to say and 2. A ton of RSS apps support it. I like the clear cut relationship and expectations of being a customer, not merely an entitled user with a free account, and I like that Feedbin is effectively platform agnostic and not tied to a specific client as long as you have a client that supports it.
NetNewsWire is my preferred client, but this is as much out of complacency as anything else. I’ve used some version of NetNewsWire for close to 15 years now. The current v5 series of releases is a very neat client, has a good team led by Brent Simmons developing it, and while I’m not sure what the feature is called, has a neat reader mode that can load the whole post even in partial-post feeds.
I use RSS mainly for blogs and webcomics, but I have a couple of news sites loaded in there as well. Most of those also send me Newsletters which I have automatically forwarded to my Instapaper account from my Inbox. I skim most posts, read some others in NetNewsWire, but if an individual post is long and I want to do more than skim, it goes straight to Instapaper. If it’s worth keeping for reference or to read again, it goes from Instapaper to my Pinboard Archive. I mark the news feeds as read about once a week regardless of whether I’ve gotten to it or not because most of it has a shelf life and if there was anything important I probably heard about it on some podcast.
Just keep that in mind when making changes to your setup in the future. RSS is a very ephemeral medium, and migrating to something like Feedbin or Feedly after you have something in place will cause data loss. That’s one of the reasons I use Pinboard.
I also use two free online services to enhance the experience: PolitePol to create a feed where there isn't one, and SiftRSS that allows me to filter through the feed to only include (or exclude) items from the feed.
[1]: https://tt-rss.org/
Minimalistic, simple, easy-to-use. I use a dockerized version running in locally with a postgres database.
Interesting you point to the 6 years time frame, I didn't realise how long I have been using Feedly. And I use RSS Reader even before Google Reader. The workflow is the same for the past 20 years. Command + Click a bunch of links. And that's it.
For mail I use mutt. Mutt and rss2email are a match made in heaven. I can quickly process the stuff I want to read and the stuff I have little interest in. Feeds like Hacker News can get out of hand quickly without the ability to quickly process...
https://github.com/skx/rss2email/
Since feeds go to your mailbox you can easily read them from multiple locations and also search them via your mail client.
They kept a bunch of the same shortcut keys and stuff that I liked about google reader. It's cloud based so you can pickup where you left off from any device.
2) This is excellent, has sped up my loading a lot. Thanks!
It's what I use too. And except for getting a new logo a while ago, absolutely nothing has changed since I started using it, which I love. I hope it never goes away.
Meanwhile, Apple invents a new magical way to set the alarm time on their phones once a year, and it infuriates me.
Not even sure I need them to de-duplicate updated articles, which it doesn't seem to do.
I wrote to their support about it since it's getting annoying, but I haven't received any reply (I'm using their paid tier). I'm guessing its kind of a rare edge case.
Tiny Tiny might be an option if the feature set has evolved to justify running a server somewhere. Last time I looked, it didn't, but that's years ago. And anyway, it's probably a good thing to have no feeds on my phone.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedbroreader
The interface is pretty good, privacy is respected as far as I can see, service is hosted on their hardware, not in the cloud, the author is very responsive when issues arrive, and the code is available for self-hosting[2].
It is also how I keep up with people on Twitter and YouTube without having to access Twitter or YouTube.
It Just Works, and I've been happy to pay the subscription fee every year. I have hundreds of feeds I subscribe to, from people who post once every few months to large composite feeds with dozens of posts daily. BazQux helps me stay on top of all that, and it's more than worth it for me.
I used to use Newsblur, great choice if a service works better for you.
I wanted offline reading though so I ended up rolling my own [1], it's a bit rough and I don't really need the offline thing since I'm at home most of the time but I still use it out of habit.
Tested a few others, e.g. the Digg Reader, around the time Google Reader was discontinued, but Inoreader was closest in functionality to GR so stuck with that.
I only use Slack as a "new article notification" system though, the reading happens on the original website where the content was posted.
Like some others have noted, using email as a storage mechanism reduces part of the problem (tracking which items are read/unread) to one that's already solved (by IMAP). Additionally, using isync lets me have local copies of everything; this used to be really important when I was a "poor" grad student, because I could do cool stuff like download a bunch of comics ahead of time on my laptop, then read webcomics/mailing-lists on the 2-hour bus ride. I still like having local copies of things on principle, although nowadays everybody is always-connected so it's not as useful.
Feedbin seems to permit receiving email newsletters as a feed, so that's one of the few making email into RSS, whereas the others all turn RSS into email.
Fever is unsupported, though [1], but it's still working nicely. Once it stops working, I'll switch to something that's supported by Reeder, which is an indispensable piece of software for me.
[1]: https://shauninman.com/archive/2016/12/24/goodbye_mint_goodb...
Currently also using NewsBlur for Stackoverflow tracking with fetchrss.com for FB and other custom feeds, however, I am moving those into my second Inoreader account.
For GitHub project tracking I use BazQux, and still do.
Why use BazQux for GitHub and nothing else (it supports Facebook feeds too)?
It's a janky one page PHP file + either simplepie or picofeed for the backend; using flat-file lists to store the feeds themselves. And it's PERFECT for me. Been using it for years.
As a non-professional (literally, I don't program for a living primarily, I sometimes teach classes in beginner stuff) this is the kind of thing I'd love to encourage more non-professionals to do. No need for even "apps" here.
https://gitlab.com/jrm4/mahrss
In action:
I also wrote a blog post about how you can use a news-flash category to automatically populate a webring using openring[1].
[0]https://jangernert.gitlab.io/blog/posts/news-flash/ [1]https://teraku.me/posts/blog-setup-deployment/
I rarely read rss on my laptop these days, but Palabre keeps the read articles in sync so I can hop on the Feedly web interface and resume at any time.
In the future I would like to migrate on self-hosted (if I found the time to reboot my home Docker Swarm cluster).
I then filter them into a folder and now I have a cross-platform synced RSS reader. I can also do any sort of filtering that I want with email filters.
The only real downside is that I haven't found a mail client that will pre-download images in the items. But I can read the text offline at least.
I haven't used it yet myself, just came across it and thought it was neat.
BBC News is another source I browse to from time to time.
I use Feedly as the syncing engine but never interact with it directly.
On iOS I use Reeder.
My feeds themselves are managed by Feedly but I rarely use that interface.
For many years I used Reeder with syncing through Feed Wrangler. I switched because rendering is better with News Explorer.
Very rarely though. It comes in very handy from time to time, like for instance when looking for something specific on Craigslist. Much easier to scan a bunch of feeds than to muck around with the website.
The feeds are predefined (curated), but the articles are sorted by Facebook engagement.
Looks and feels very much like Google Reader.
Prior to that I was using Miniflux, but I wanted to apply some filters to a particular feed and I realised that I already had a tool with advanced features for filtering and organising short messages with a subject and body: email.
I use it to subscribe to several dozen podcasts, a few webcomics, and a comedian's tour schedule.
I have a few webcomic RSS feeds as well as an RSS feed for an IRL standup comic's schedule. I also have an RSS feed for a particular church's weekly service.
Podcast Addict works for more than just strictly pure straight-forward pure podcasts.
Note Sage which I liked for years stopped working/being updated with FF switching to quantum something...
But it's very buggy. Every so often it pops up an old feed as if it's unread. Sometimes it adds new unread feeds with empty titles. I like to delete feeds after I've read them, but sometimes the delete option doesn't do anything, but if I change to another directory and back the item is gone.
There's long-standing open bugs for some / all of these.
- Make the petition on Change.org or something like that
- Put it on HN (there are a lot of HN'ers who'd want it)
But I'm building my own product soon because I see quite a few UI flaws with inoreader.
The subscription is $30/year. I voluntarily opted in $50/year just because I like it so much.
Roll your own.
So three things: 1. talk to your friends about it, I've been advocating it to a lot of people and lots of them are interested. Feedly is relatively easy to setup for a layperson and showing them cool lesser-known feeds is a great way of getting them started (as you all know, there are niche blogs lots of places and the act of self-curation is really empowering). But if you self host, maybe offer to give them an acct...
2. I think gReader was a start but it was a slightly different newsfeed environment. Now everyone I talk to understands the dangers of newsfeeds and algorithmic manipulation, but they don't know what to do. I think there's a space for a RSS startup (or even feedly) to really press their advantage on self-curated feeds and no infinite scrolling that would appeal to a lot of people. The little RSS advertising I see are not focused on this
3. One thing people might miss is some twitter/fb/etc accounts which they know they like, and want to bring to their readers. I think a lot of people know the difference between the people they follow who they actually care about and the ones that are just on the same platforms. I'm thinking especially about Cory Doctorow's Adversarial Interoperability (https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6c-cory-doctorow-on-adve...) but if the platforms won't do it, having a free/open source twitter/fb/etc scraper that is reliable would be a huge win. I've tried some but a lot of them are buggy or expensive and it's annoying for a layperson. This could definitely be improved and I wish some of the platforms would export rss feeds too (e.g. youtube did and then it got weird). Also having easy integration to html-diff non-RSS websites would be great. I've used it to check for job postings, cdc news, etc, and I think a lot of people would like it.
All of which is to say, we have this old technology that is secretly adopted by a lot of websites (especially because of wordpress/etc which make it a default) and which could solve a lot of deep problems that a lot of people are struggling with. I think HN type people could really make impact here in expanding the userbase