Ask HN: What RSS Reader do you use in 2022?
With two posts on the front page on the revival of RSS I'm wondering what RRS Reader I should use.
I've been increasingly using their search feature, which allows you to search for text across a "folder" (group of subscriptions) or across all your subscriptions.
Another nice feature: If you enter just the home URL for a web site when creating a new subscription, it'll automatically search commonly used URLs (/feed, /rss, etc.) to find their RSS feed for you.
I use it everyday and works fine, "some" might be a small but vocal group? Might not be representative for a common user.
I mainly browse on my laptop, but it's pretty decent on mobile.
The biggest issue is that once you invest in a reader, your data aside from the feed opml, is stuck in that reader so your favourites, labels, and content can't migrate.
I'd gently push back on the migration issue. As long as you're going the self-hosted route, all of this data exists on your machine. A tool for painless migration from X reader to Y reader might not exist, but at least it's feasible to build. If your data is in some hosted solution, you're at the mercy of the provider to implement data exports.
They run annual Black Friday specials that end up giving you 18 months for the cost of 12.
They have advanced filtering and rules.
They have some social features I don't use but that approximate what Google Reader was mourned for.
I really rather wholeheartedly recommend them.
The only negative thing I could say about them is that they seem rather close-minded in a rather non-P.R.-friendly way to feature requests, and don't seem very interested in improving the product in ways their customers request, although they do, however, still (slowly) improve the product. It's not in stasis as many other products sometimes tend to be (cough Remember the Milk cough cough)
That having been said, to me, the product feels rather rock solid as it is in its existing functionality, and to me, it feels like a solid power tool.
Works great with self-hosted FreshRSS.
Possibly my favorite software release of 2022!
I connect/subscribe it to various things - one of which is a previously curated FreshRSS instance, running in a docker container. So reeder connects and updates read/new feed additions too.
200+ feeds, using it since 1.0.
That gets read from the Reeder app on iOS or on the web on Windows. Longer pieces get saved to Instapaper for Kindle-reading and archived on pinboard.
It's a simple, no-frills experience that reminds me of what I liked about Google Reader.
I use their PWA on mobile, which works really well.
Miniflux is designed to work well on a small screen with touch input. So the fact that, unlike some other options, it doesn't have a native app is not too much of a limitation.
If you subscribe to some feeds that post 100+ times a day (like a major news outlet) and others that post only once every couple months or so (like many personal blogs), you'll never catch the latter because those posts are always drowned in a sea of the former. Reddit deals with this problem by weighting posts from each subreddit you subscribe to so that your frontpage contains content from as many of your subs as possible.
All I want for Christmas is for this idea to get some traction. Hoping to make the time to hack on this myself Q1 of next year.
Personally, I "solve" this problem with existing settings by excluding NPR/NYT/New Yorker from my global unread feed. They belong to a category (/news) that I can choose to visit if I want to. I find myself not visiting it that often, personally.
That being said, I have thought of implementing something like this. Maybe something that "aggregates" posts into 24 hour buckets, so they'll still show up in your global feed, but won't occupy 80% of the screen space any more.
Curious to hear your thoughts on these ideas.
- Some feeds only provide title/summary and not the full text article (yes, I know there are full-text extraction service, but last time I tried them, none of them was perfect, and I don't want to play the guessing game -- "Am I reading the full article, or a broken extraction?")
- Some feeds are just better to be read in a web browser. e.g.: Project release notes on GitHub, which usually come with links to PRs, commits...etc, so I need to open several browser tabs to consume the content anyways.
- Some personal blog sites have very beautiful (or interesting) designs that I find myself actually enjoys poking around.
- Ad-blocking -- given the current popularity of RSS, I don't know if it really makes sense financially for websites to do so, but I notice some feeds do inject ads.
- If I ever need to click a link in an article, jumping from a reader software to a browser is too big of a context switch that disrupts my flow -- just let me go through all the feeds right now, and I will decide how to prioritize the most interesting ones and allocate my reading time later.
For my use cases, Unread on iOS gave me the best experience. All the gestures optimized for single-hand operations are just fantastic. Sadly, they switched from one-time payment to monthly subscription and I can't justify the cost when I only use it in a very light way(just for sorting items). Reeder is not as good, but is comfortable enough for me.
Same here but I think we were mostly forced into it. Site owners care more about getting you on their site than the quality of the content. There's no incentive to include a bare bones version for RSS so, if they even have an RSS feed, it's just links. Aggregate sites can't even include the content. Also, there's just too much multimedia content these days, a proper browser will always be more reliable for viewing it. I really don't mind it. I just love not having to re-scan over headlines I've already seen or intentionally skipped over.
This is the year of the RSS reader - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105572
It's time for an RSS revival (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105558
Edit: forgot to mention RssBridge [4] to get tweets that match certain criteria as an RSS feed. RssBridge also provides access to many other platforms.
[0]: https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS
[1]: https://github.com/readrops/Readrops
[2]: https://github.com/html2rss/html2rss-web
It has a highly customizable UI.
It handles all the fetching/refreshes/storage right in your browser, no need to install anything else or self-host a backend.
And you can import/export OPML feed collections, so you can easily switch to another solution when you outgrow it.
The only downside I've found: it doesn't sync between machines (at least, not for free). That's totally fine when you're just trying out RSS for the first time, but it does get annoying if you eventually want to read on, say, a phone, tablet, and laptop in different situations. For that use case, NNW + FreshRSS is my current, excellent solution.
[0] https://github.com/dauphine-dev/drop-feeds
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/drop-feeds/
I used to use https://blogtrottr.com which I do still think is a good product, they just didn't quite fit my needs so after about 8 years I ended up creating my own.
I keep hoping Feedly will help separate the wheat from the chaff in my feeds with their ML work, but it seems to require me doing more than clicking on what to read to identify my likes and dislikes.
I’ve played with Matter and Readwise Reader, and so far I’m not impressed. I like Readwise in theory, but the RSS reading UI is a bit slow though I might need to tweak the settings to make it quicker.
It's just so incredibly polished and fast. Plus, it's open source!
iOS: Unread, which is just supremely beautiful. I'm amazed that the "double tap to mark read/unread" interaction isn't standard.
Mac: Reeder, which is nice and flexible though not perfect.
Also recently did I little write up of my workflow: https://www.liamjbennett.me/posts/2022-12-23-workflow-2023/
One of the surprisingly few readers I could find that is local-only and doesn't require an account.
I self host a lot of services but don't see the need for an RSS reader server-side.
It is a local reader -- no account required, no server storage, but stores everything on the phone.
I've also used NewsBlur which I would probably like more if I paid. One thing about Handy News Reader is there is a way to see the URLs of existing feeds, which I have not found how to do in NewsBlur.
A previous discussion from 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658424
I haven't tried any of the others in comments here, so can't make comparisons; that might be interesting.
Never understood why nobody talks about NewsExplorer
https://apps.apple.com/app/id1032668306, the only third party app on my phone that is available on ALL iDevices it’s actually insane
iCloud sync without needed rss backend, snapshot/export/import/folder Also reads Twitter private lists and feed
Search inside articles
Stable with tens of thousands of articles unread
I don't usually read my feeds in the RSS service, but I look at the headlines and mark what interests me to send it to Pocket and read it quietly there or on the original website of the site.
It's better and more customizable than Newsboat, plus there is an option to transfer everything from the Newsboat to it. It is not really a reader but a parser, but that's what makes it great.
Having everything happen locally on my own machine is great - I never want to be in the position of losing Google Reader again. And the option to do non-interactive refresh makes is almost as nice for high volume feeds.
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It is a daily digest and supports also terminal mode.
Before that, I used Feedly and Google Reader before that.
I only do RSS browsing on my phone, triage what I'm interested in to emails sent to myself or send to pinboard for archiving/maybe visit later (although probably moving away from PB soon)
Super neat and minimal web based rss reader. It also needs minimal resources and virtually no maintenance.
I've used elfeed, it demand too much time to skim many posts, similar to Miniflux who is quicker but still demand too much time. ttRSS allow to scroll marking read, that's enough for me. Feeds nowadays simply have much value as a tool, but too little values per mean post.
Gnus with scoring is nice, but again too slow to skim, even with scoring help.
Both of the mobile options integrate with Feedly for sync'd read/unread status, etc.
It's a simple script that I manually trigger once a day to check my list of feeds from a config file. It caches the known posts and generates static HTML with summaries of the new posts for me to browse locally.
Thanks in advance.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/money-stuff
[1] https://computer.rip, run by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jcrawfordor
Also hi sbolt