Ask HN: What are you using for a RSS Reader? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are you using for a RSS Reader?

46 pointssqwrell91 comments

I am using FeedBro, it's a browser extension and it does not sync data yet. So I just export my subscriptions to a OPML file as a backup. It's free and has some nice features.

For other feeds I use iNoReader which is really packed with all kinds of features.

I was wondering what you all are using these days.

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https://newsblur.com

It's an online service. It has features to extract the whole story from the source website, and to automatically filter feed items according to title, author, tags etc. There are android and iOS apps available; at least the Android one is opensource.

One can self-host it, but at $36/year it's almost worth it paying the author to avoid the hassle.

It'd cost more to run it yourself on DigitalOcean, as far as I can tell.

I use that as well, great service and the annual cost is very-very good.

I've been using the free version of Feedly for what I think is around 10 years. It does everything that I need it to, though I may not be enough of a power user for that to matter to anyone else, and I've never once felt that they're shoving the paid version down my throat.

There have been times where the service was down, but it's been extremely rare, and luckily RSS feeds aren't that critical to me.

My experience with Feedly has been similar. I use the free version every day with no problems. The ads are unobtrusive, too.

Shout out to Inoreader! Brilliant service. I use it to track website changes and follow my private Twitter lists. It offers an option for newsletters without spamming my inbox. I track over 400+ feeds (and counting) to track everything that catches my fancy. I use Readwise to revise what I have captured; Inoreader offers annotations which go to Readwise. I also use IFTTT with it to pipe specific feeds to Telegram. Readwise completes the loop for repetition; Raindrop.io as the bookmark (with highlights) and annotations for tracking whatever I have read. I can use it to export to Obsidian and take notes.

+1 to inoreader. Happy paying customer. Killer features were a) being able to follow the one or two private twitters I wanted without being forced to be signed in, b) being able to "filter" said twitter feeds to just 'images' and 'no reblogs' - perfect for following artists who draw cool stuff but filtering out meaningless text posts.

Started using it after google reader died and haven't looked back. only thing that would cause me to jump ship if they started censoring/filtering stuff upstream.

https://fraidyc.at/

It's a browser extension, and it's been very pleasant to use. I came across it on a previous Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22545878

Now if only it worked on mobile…

I found Fraidycat impossible to uninstall and wipe all data, except by restoring my Firefox profile from a backup.

Just checked and it seems to work on Kiwi browser on Android

NetNewsWire on macOS. It's just such a well polished Mac app that it makes me happy. Plus, RSS is just cool.

I'm not a huge fan of Mac as a platform or OS but it has so many cool and polished desktop applications; I'm jealous.

That’s the main reason that I’m staying on macOS. The available apps are very good.

For the record: NetNewsWire is also available for iOS. It’s very nice.

I started running it side by side with Reeder 7, I actually prefer NNW! FOSS ftw!

I have a Raspberry Pi running Miniflux [1] and a daemon running to send webhooks [2]. These webhooks go to an n8n [3] workflow that distributes the posts based on keywords or source to different channels - like Telegram, Twitter (my own feeds), and a custom made notifications app I'm developing.

[1]: https://miniflux.app

[2]: https://sr.ht/~gjabell/mfn/

[3]: https://n8n.io

I use Miniflux myself!!

I use Feeder [0], downloaded from fdroid.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/spacecowboy/Feeder

Sadly, I accumulate much more feeds than I read. Just like podcasts. I subscribe to too much of them. Download a lot of episodes, and I do not listen to them at all.

Does anyone know how to prioritize?

I use Feeder from FDroid too. I create tags to prioritize the ones I read the most; YMMV.

I use Reeder[0] on my Apple devices, I also use a Email2RSS service[1] for the ones that are asking me to subscribe.

[0]: https://reederapp.com/

[1]: https://kill-the-newsletter.com/

I also use Kill the newsletter, but it could store more content in the feed.

I'm using Nextcloud already and that has an officially supported RSS daemon app[1]. I mainly use it with this really good Android client[2] (that's on F-Droid) that supports connecting to it (and Miniflux it appears, which I noticed a bunch of mentions in this thread of).

Probably worth mentioning too since this is HN, of the really nice hnrss[3], which I use for comment notifications in RSS.

[1] https://github.com/nextcloud/news

[2] https://github.com/bubelov/news

[3] https://hnrss.github.io

HNRSS is epic!! I'm using it right now lol.

Thanks for pointing out hnrss!

I use Thunderbird for feeds (but not email, newsgroups, calendar or chat).

It's just as capable as a lot of dedicated feed readers, all of which I found to be a bit clunky. As least Thunderbird's brand of clunky is nostalgicly familiar.

My problem with Thunderbird (and the reason I switched to NewsBlur, which I happily pay for, although there's a freemium tier and you can also run it yourself) is that it has to be up to receive updates. That may be acceptable on an always-on-always-connected desktop, but on a laptop, when traveling or when I occasionally take a few days off technology - it means thunderbird has likely lost updates (most RSS feeds only publish the most recent 10-20 stories, so you need to poll them frequently).

Not affiliated with NewsBlur other than a happy customer of 5 years, highly recommend it.

+1 Thunderbird, however I also use it for handling a collection of IMAP inboxes and importing iCal events.

I only use it for email.

Feeder on Android from FDroid. It is being very actively developed and has been improving rapidly.

Only thing I wish is that it would handle a dynamically changing feed list that can be kept on NextCloud across devices, a la keepass.

I also use TT-RSS self-hosted to aggregate academic article feeds into a single one I can share with my students. But I hear that app community has become quite toxic.

Another Feedbin user. Between the UI quality and the support for mailing lists, Twitter, and YouTube, it's simply excellent.

+1 I’ve been paying for Feedbin since Google Reader shut down and one of the first things that impressed me was how responsive the author was to feature discussions and bug reports on Github.

Unfortunately not to me, though. I would use Feedbin if the feeds weren't limited to 400.

Or simply the need for backend upgrades.

I use email. I've done this for a long time as evidenced by this old blog post:

https://kevincox.ca/2013/06/27/email-as-rss-reader/

I like it because I already have email synced across all of my devices and my email clients have configurable notifications which works well for RSS where I mostly don't get notifications. Most of my feeds are filtered into a folder that is pre-downloaded to my phone and I read it when I have some downtime. But it is also easy to have a few important feeds go straight to my inbox when I want to see updates right away.

I used a third-party service for most of the time but have recently started up my own RSS-to-email service so am using that now. You can also self-host very easily.

Same here. I ported the original python rss2email to go, added some filters and customizations, and now just handle RSS via mail everywhere:

https://github.com/skx/rss2email/

I use https://kevinfiol.com/reader/#dailies

It's a personal fork of Bubo Reader by George Mandis. It's essentially just a Node.js script that fetches the latest stories from some RSS feeds I have stored in JSON, and then deploys a static site to Github Pages as a single HTML file. I use Github Actions to have it automatically run every 2 hours.

Bubo Reader: https://github.com/georgemandis/bubo-rss

My fork: https://github.com/kevinfiol/reader

Tiny-Tiny-RSS on a self hosted server

Why does an RSS reader need a server?

One reason is for it to be accessible from a variety of devices via a URL, with your reading progress synced.

I use pipedream[0] to subscribe to RSS feeds and save the file into my cloud storage as a markdown file, all synced to my local device. I can then read them by using whatever markdown reader I have.

[0]: https://pipedream.com. Though I'd say that it's pretty easy to bootstrap a this using a period script in your own device, considering that you probably only need to fetch the feeds once a day at most.

https://github.com/nkanaev/yarr

I'm self hosting Yarr (Yet Another RSS Reader).

Yet another shameless plug of my feed reader side project: https://github.com/msurdi/feedo

Not many features, and nothing super special, but I use it daily since I started it and works fine for myself. I'm also trying to make it as easy as possible to run, either on your own laptop or on any hosting provider.

Liferea on the desktop, smd_xml[0] for some web projects that parse, and PHP plus...simplexml? I think for some other desktop scripts. My desktop panel lights up in different ways depending on some RSS based genmon scripts. Some Python and Ruby in there too, somewhere.

0. https://stefdawson.com/sw/plugins/smd_xml

Edit: That was interesting, URL updated

Created a (free) account on https://rss.envs.net and I read my feeds with third-party Android tt-rss clients. A couple of curl+jq aliases help me also monitoring incoming articles between two pieces of work thanks to the API.

Previously I enjoyed Flym for Android, but I decided to use this tt-rss account for several reasons (mostly synchronization between devices).

BazQux.com, since a few weeks after Google Reader shut down. Nearly 10 years and I can't remember a single outage. Works great on both desktop and mobile.

I use the new dashboard site that I'm currently developing, Glimpst.com. See the Imgur link below for one of the available layouts and the styling. I also have podcasts on my dash (but it has other available widgets too). I plan on launching this in the next couple of months. https://imgur.com/a/STWXsPN

Nicefeed and newsboat, mobile and desktop respectively

I use https://sumi.news because I like to read feeds grouped by day.

Might be worth mentioning that you created sumi.news.

I wrote a script which runs every couple hours and emails me any unread feed items. So I guess I'm using my inbox.

https://betamagic.nl/products/newsexplorer.html

I've been using News Explorer and I've been pretty happy with it. There's no subscription and it even has a tvOS/watchOS app

Not pure-play reader, but shoutout to start.me, I've been using it for years now. The idea is to customize your one-stop start page (with to-do-lists, weather,...). I use it for 90% RSS plus some market data, it's actually my main source of news (including for HN).

Paid (bottom tier) Inoreader subscriber since its inception (since Google Reader was terminated). I don't use any of its fancy features, but use it across multiple devices, so it's pretty much my "internet brain" (as Google Reader was for me in its era).

https://bazqux.com/

I am using Reeder for years on both my Mac, iPad and iPhone. Smooth UI which just works. I pay for new releases every few years to keep supporting the author.

As syncing service I use Feedbin since the Google reader apocalyps. I rather pay for a service now to better ensure it survives.

FeedReader with DecSync plugin: https://github.com/39aldo39/FeedReader

It's a desktop app that, with the plugin, sync across my different machines.

I use feedbin. On desktop i use the web interface, on mobile I use Reeder (with feedbin as the source). Does everything I need. Might try self-hosting at one point, I have a couple of rPi's for running pihole and other services anyway.

GNOME Feeds, frozen on the last GTK3 release. It's nice, but the browser engine is pretty bad (webkit-based) and I don't really agree with it's later design changes. Probably going to start looking for something new once it breaks.

Newsboat. It's blazing fast.

The Bat Mail client on Windows 10: https://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/ Thunderbird on Linux...

I am using Feeder (downloaded it from Fdroid). Nothing fancy, gets job done.

https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk (Written in Rust, Good fit if you use Gnome)

Im currently self-hosting Miniflux. I'm quite happy with it.

Elfeed, a reader for emacs: https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed

Miniflux with iOS Reeder

I went down the rabbit hole and tried everything until settling on Reeder. It’s been over a year and I’m very happy with its simplicity and it “just works”.

Emacs and elfeed!

I don't use RSS and never did, is it so rare to not use RSS or listen to IT podcasts as a IT professional?

  depends on how you prefer to keep yourself updated. I could just as well manually make the rounds and visit my preferred news sources and blogs, but I'm lazy

sfeed_curses. It works just well enough that I haven't tried to replace it, but not well enough that I don't think about replacing it. I don't automatically update my feeds, sync across devices, or maintain a central repo, just manually update in the morning when I check the news.

Miniflux. I pay for the hosted version.

I use the same app I use for podcasts, AntennaPod. I find it convenient to have everything together.

Feedly is what I'm currently using. It's fine, but I really only use the basic functionality.

Feedly + Unread on IOS

I use slack. I setup some private channels in slack and subscribe to various feeds in each channel.

https://1feed.app/

9/10 very good.

Emacs Elfeed

I use feeder from fdroid

Pushover, a python script and a cron job.

The same way I read Hacker News.

Selfhosting freshRSS

Feedly free version + NetNewsWire to consume on iOS

Reeder on Mac/iOS syncing to The Old Reader

NetNewsWire (iOS)

Akregator (a KDE application)

Feedbin and Netnewswire.

fantastic combo!

newsboat is all you need. Free and easy to use.

I use blogtrottr.

theoldreader.com

It’s in browser and minimal

FreshRSS

reeder 5

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