Hacker News Reader

Comment by Daunk | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to use RSS for everything, but the problem has always been that most RSS readers are really really bad. I want one where I can add all RSS feeds I care about, then easily filter through the posts by assigning tags I care about, get notifications about certain tags, and easily navigate huge lists. I basically want to filter based on content, tags and other things, then set what kind of notification I'll get based on tags. One tag might give an actual toast notification, one might just be highlighted, others might be dimmed and marked as "uninteresting" and some might be straight up hidden. So far I've not found a single RSS reader I like and they all just sort of act like a basic email client, and usually don't do cross-platform either.

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I use FreshRSS which is hosted on my home server. What it does is allow you to categorise the feeds and you can also do some further things like hiding them from the main feed if you choose to. Then beyond that it pulls article tags from the original sites which you can search or predefine a filter for and you can also label individual articles you find. What it can't do unfortunately is allow multiple tags for a site to be applied, so its not possible to classify content from a source multiple ways and have it surfaced in multiple places while only having it shown once and read once. You can put a site in multiple categories but reading it in one place wont read it in the other.

It is one of the better systems I have used, its by no means perfect but its fairly quick and easy to use with some decent shortcuts for working through the sites and I manage hundreds with it and it happily works across every platform since its a website.

+1 for FreshRSS. Use that with NetNewsWire[0] as a client and RSS looks very nice.

[0] https://netnewswire.com

I don't think it gets quite to the level of customization you want, but I find Feedly to be very good and is definitely cross-platform. Give it a try if you haven't. The for-pay Pro model has some extra features, and I have had good luck contacting their support.

Does one of you want to give a try to lenns.io? That’s a new type of RSS reader I’m working on. It has import/export so you can try and leave easily.

I’m planning for the aforementioned customizations but they are still a few months away.

I would definitely be happy to alpha/beta test a "different" RSS reader.

Disclaimer: I have used RSS consistently yet, but I have installed a few readers and tried them over the years. Just never broke the old habits. But I should know the gist of it.

feel free to be annoying and email me at the address in my profile if you ever want to (for feedback, brainstorming... etc).

Count me in.

I am using Inoreader at present, and it will be good to have a different "competitor".

How can I contact you :)?

I make this exact same comment about every new RSS reader.

The information density of Lenns.io is way too sparse.

It displays 9 articles per page on my browser, and I don't seen any way to change that.

By comparison the compact view I'm using in Feedly displays 24 or so articles per page.

I'm not sure if my RSS use is typical, but I suspect it is. I subscribe to a lot of feeds, but I don't actually read but a small number of articles surfaced. I'm not quite sure what the percentage of articles I read is, but I'm guessing it's anywhere from under 1% to upto 5%. It obviously varies a lot by source, but overall it's pretty low.

If I skip 95 articles out of every 100 listed, I need an RSS reader that allows me to glance through a lot of content quickly. Showing me 9 articles per page is going to be far too slow.

I do have some feeds I follow that are visual in nature, for example art related blogs. Those I usually browse with a card view in Feedly, which displays a thumbnail of some sorts with the article.

One default view that's as sparse as the one in lenns.io currently is just not going to work.

I just want the ability to have some sort of intelligent negative filters, i.e. the ability to nuke content I don't care about.

For example, I'm a bit of a sneaker head, and subscribe to a lot of sneaker blogs. But I really don't like Nike shoes, which is the most popular sneaker brand, certainly in the US, and every sneaker blog has several Nike related articles every day. I never read any of them. I'd like to just completely omit them from my feeds.

That's kind of a simple example, and I can actually do that somewhat easily, but there are more complex examples. Let's say for example human rights related blogs, but ignore all propaganda content produced by either Governmental sources or about organizations associated with human rights violators. Or ignore all articles mentioning musicians, if the mention is about celebrity gossip. Or ignore content about Al Franken, if it's about his political activity, but still list content that's about his comedy work. Or vice versa.

NewsBlur (not affiliated; happy customer) has a feature where it hides articles according to keywords, and can also highlight articles accordingly.

I agree, but would add that nailing these features doesn't excuse a reader without sufficient support for customization of the UI (especially content). I might be able to excuse a reader with a polished, clean, and opinionated design (like Apple & Google's eBook readers), but would prefer to have as much freedom as possible, to the point of user-stylesheet support or some such low-level measure. Bonus points for features easing the manipulation of such 'profiles', such as a simple theme selector for easy swapping between an arbitrary number of custom styles and support for per-feed defaults.

Not to mention accessibility features, which readers are well positioned to support.

Not to be too picky, these are my ideals and I wouldn't so blutly demand such feature coverage from a developer. Y'all do what you think is best and I'll find what works best for me, thx to amyone who's contributed to a reader c:

https://netnewswire.com is one of the best apps I use regularly, not just among RSS clients. Good point about tags etc though.

I wrote a simple "RSS to Email" utility, which I use for reading feeds.

I can filter either in my mail-client, or in the utility itself, to include/exclude entries from feeds based upon regular expressions, and similar things.

It is pretty flexible - at least for the case when the feed itself contains the complete text of an entry. Often you'll find feeds contain only the "summary" of a blog-post, or article. Those are a bit harder to handle.

There is also the much more complete rss2email tool ( originally started by Aaron Swartz )

https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email

I've been using Inoreader and enjoy it. I'm only using the free plan, but the paid versions seem to offer some of the things you're looking for.

There's multiple RSS to Email services (and trivial open source software you can use to convert RSS feeds to E-Mails to yourself).

Isn't that what you're looking for? Then you can use any non-"basic email client" to get all the sorts of advanced filtering etc. you're describing.

Sounds like you want something that uses RSS data to build a more freeform database.

I wouldn’t describe RSS software as bad but they do often prioritize the reading experience, which is in conflict with data management due to the small market keeping developer resources minimal.

So you want to create regex based filters that:

  - Sort articles into lists

  - Tag articles by category

  - Dim articles that may be uninteresting

  - Highlight articles you are most likely to enjoy

  - Also have various notification preferences

Try https://www.newsblur.com/ it does a lot of what you're asking for and works well on web and mobile app.

https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email

Thanks for specifying what you're looking for. These are the sorts of posts that help guide me in my projects.

Inoreader. Does everything and more.

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