What's your favorite RSS feed reader? | Hacker News Reader

What's your favorite RSS feed reader?

25 pointsjtwoodhouse117 comments

I've been using a subpar tool lately that has proven increasingly buggy over time. I'm curious what other options are out there.

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I use Inoreader, the closest I could find to Google Reader, it has all I would need for an RSS reader and way more, I don't know how good their apps are because the web version is just great in desktop and mobile browsers.

- https://www.inoreader.com/

I use this also. I have some issues with it, but I won't bother to change unless I find something significantly better.

The feature I love most is being able to filter feed items based on content. This is great for sites that report on lots of different topics, and I can just eliminate the posts I don't care about.

I'm using it basically since Google Reader died. It's reliable and has everything I want. Its one of the few apps I am happily paying for. They often have Black Friday deals, if you want to save a little.

Love inoreader. It also lets you sub to facebook pages, newsletters, reddit feeds and telegram channels.

+1 They also have a solid API i use for some automations

Another vote for Feedly here. I like the interface, it's pretty simple and I don't need much (nor want more). I'm on the free plan. I can get my feeds from any of my devices, which is important to me. The iOS apps for my phone and ipad work great. That's really all I need.

I'm also on the free plan, and it has everything I need, in sync between all my devices and platforms.

I also love Feedly, and pay for it. "mute filters" are a great feature. I can exclude keywords from feeds.

So, for example, I consume HN via rss, and filter out all the stories about tech & political celebrities, which have low intellectual caloric content.

I should probably add a filter to exclude "?" to apply Betteridge's law...

I've been using RSS-to-email since forever. I now run my own RSS-to-email service.

I filter (almost all) of them into folders that don't notify and then they are there ready to read across all of my devices that are logged into my email.

I find that email clients are quite suited to RSS reading. They have folders, searching, filtering and unread/read/deleted tracking that is synced cross-device. And for the few feeds that I want to be "urgent" it is easy to send them to my inbox.

I have written about my workflow in the past:

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

https://kevincox.ca/2023/06/27/decade-of-rss-via-email/

Yes! My favorite RSS feed reader is mutt (and the email ecosystem around it like procmail).

With email I already have infinitely flexible filtering, sorting, on-the-fly modification of headers and content, and a reader with best in class threading and TUI.

So I use RSS to email to inject all the RSS content into this ecosystem and inherit all the goodness of email for RSS as well.

(This is how I follow HN, for instance.)

Funnily enough, I've recently been looking at email-to-RSS to clear some newsletters out of my inbox :-)

I know. Everyone is different and there is nothing wrong with that. I don't think RSS-to-email is for everyone. And I definitely don't have (most) feeds going to my inbox. That would be far too much. The vast majority of my feeds go to a "Not Important" folder.

I also find it interesting that running an RSS-to-Email service I have noticed that we both fetch feeds from and send mail to kill-the-newsletter.com. I would be curious to know what their use cases are.

I run an instance of FreshRSS [0] and access it from a browser, but I also use NetNewsWire [1] as a client on platforms where it is available.

[0] https://freshrss.org/

[1] https://netnewswire.com/

I use FreshRSS as well and I use it exclusively from Android (Firefox Browser). Works surprisingly well even if it looks a bit dated.

I'd love recommendations for a good Android client. Right now I just have the site installed as a web app. It works, but I have a foldable phone and the site displays a little weird when unfolded in landscape.

FocusReader works well, the free version has some ads.

gReader Pro is pretty good on Android, doesn't get in the way too much.

I’m run an instance as well. I use Lire as client for iOS.

Lire is hands down the best reader on iOS, and a one-time purchase too. I really love it.

I self-host FreshRSS. I prefer the feeds to be pulled from a server rather than locally from a browser. This lets me check out news feeds from work without worrying about my computer pinging websites IT doesn't like.

+1 for self hosted FreshRSS. The only feature I'm missing from it is selecting multiple unread entries and marking them as 'read' instead of opening them one by one or marking the whole feed. Other than that it gives a feeling like using the Google Reader.

IT doesn’t like the domain I use for self hosted stuff… ;(

I've been using NewsBlur since the demise of Google Reader.

+1 for NewsBlur https://newsblur.com/

Another +1.

Simple if you want it, you can make it complex if you need it. Decent price from the start.

And I can attach Reeder to it directly.

+1 for Newsblur

Feedly [0] (web app and on IOS) has been amazing since Google Reader died. On IOS it makes flipping through items and saving them for later a smooth and relatively fast experience.

[0] https://feedly.com

Yes, plus it can be used as a RSS “engine” for iOS reader apps such as Reeder, which is my favorite way of consuming my feeds.

Self-hosted miniflux (golang based). Very minimalist, I used to miss a phone app for it but the mobile webpage is good enough for me.

I turned to it when the tiny tiny reader maintainer turned out to be a huge p*ck. Wasn't just me, others confirmed.

Think I am using miniflux for 6-7 years now

https://miniflux.app/

There's a decent android app for it https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=be.martinelli....

Didn't know this. Thanks for the tip!

You can also use FeedMe Android app with Miniflux.

Self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS works well, supporting OPML import/export, mobile clients, and a Reader-like theme. https://tt-rss.org

NewsBlur so I could have everything (articles that are read, saved ...) synced between my laptop and smartphone.

https://www.newsblur.com

Reeder for iPad! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reeder-5/id1529445840

The iPhone and Mac apps are also great. I've been using them for years. You can use it to show your feeds from popular rss aggregators or it can aggregate by itself via icloud, and it syncs across your devices.

On Android, Handy News Reader from the f-droid.org app store works well, once I went through all the settings and customized it, and got used to it. Except now it doesn't auto-fetch (it used to) and I don't know if I did something wrong, but manually fetching new stories isn't bad. 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

And from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108413

I haven't tried any of the others in comments here, so can't make comparisons; that might be interesting.

I use Feedly. It’s a very good app but the company is making some bizarre decisions to try and turn it into an “intelligence platform”. Like lots of weird/useless AI generated summaries that all seem to be related to the financial implications of the article. You can turn most of them off but it’s a worrying trend in general.

Feedly paid-for plan. Just works in both browser and Android versions.

There's also Lighthouse (https://lighthouseapp.io/). Compared to typical RSS readers it organizes content into Inbox and Library. Where new content lands in the inbox, where you can sort through it and add content you're interested in to the library. So it's basically a combination of feed reader and read-it-later app.

NetNewsWire is great, but iOS/iPad/Mac only. It syncs between devices using iCloud, so without a Feedly etc. account. That feature seems to be pretty rare.

If you’re already using a Mac and an iPhone, NetNewsWire is great! It’s native, beautiful, and "just works". I finally ended the chase for the perfect RSS reader and started enjoying my feeds.

Another good one that does iCloud sync only is News Explorer.

Feedly's web app is awesome. I usually use the web version on iPad.

The main problem with RSS apps these days is they respect the article summary and do not render the full article in the app, so you have to read in the in-app browser or default browser. The (iOS) in-app browser doesn't have extensions or dark mode, so

Alternatively, everyone wants you to visit their site so only publish their RSS with a summary.

https://netnewswire.com also one of my favourite apps of any kind

Gnus in Emacs (recently Atom support [1] has been added by Daniel Semyonov)

1. https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/lisp/gnus...

I use a self hosted instance of tiny tiny rss (tt-rss) for subscriptions and Omnivore for reading. Omnivore is open source with no data collection. The iOS app is very good with integration for saving items from the firefox web browser. The web app works well on the Linux desktop with the Firefox addon for saving articles.

Newsboat

By a mile. The command line doesn't really bother me, and the killer feature is being able to hook it into my crontab, so it acts like Google Reader (without the social features), but it's completely local to my machine.

I honestly don't want to rely on another service again if I can help it, and this tool really scratches that itch.

I'm also using newsboat, mostly in android where I run it via nix-on-droid (https://github.com/nix-community/nix-on-droid). I generate the config and url files via a nix script that has a bunch of functions, for example for taking a twitter username and getting the RSS feed from a nitter instance. It's also using for ensuring that programs used in filter/exec feeds are used - I'm using sed for replacing the nitter instance with x.com like so: "filter:/nix/store/82v9hz5nav5swvdmz4cq53f2m671njcc-gnused-4.9/bin/sed 's#nitter.poast.org#x.com#g':https://nitter.poast.org/<user>/rss"

Is the content on RSS feeds significantly different that what you can find on platforms like HackerNews or Reddit?

Yes, without a doubt. It only has sites that I want to read, I can add or remove sites, move them to different folders. I can save stuff for later. It's much more controlled and quiet. That's not to say I don't like Reddit or HN, it's just different in my reader.

Well HackerNews is one feed in my reader.

RSS is how I read HN. I go through all the articles the reach the front page, async at my leisure. also HNRSS has amazing features. https://hnrss.org/

Yes.

https://feedbin.com/

+1 since 2013 according to my invoice search!

Bazqux Reader for the actual service, “Reeder” on both macOS and iOS for the client I use.

I didn't get on with miniflux so I've been using Feeder for Android the past year or so and really like it. I also use Newsboat on desktop which is great but gets used less as I tend to consume feeds on mobile it seems.

I mostly still use RSSOwl. Thunderbird also works reasonably well as an RSS reader.

RSS Guard. FOSS, cross platform with mpv integration. lite is the plain text only version.

https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard/

Akregator ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kontact#News_feed_aggregator ) for Linux.

Firefox + Feedbro extension + RSShub container (self hosted) does the trick for those that have and had RSS.

It's not longer Feedly, since they introduced that distracting flashing green "AI summary" button. Even disabling all the things it should be doing in the Settings, it still shows.

Feedly

QuiteRSS on Windows, MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD and OS/2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuiteRSS

I am happily using Vienna (https://www.vienna-rss.com/) for about a decade, but it is Mac only.

Fluent Reader is a nice FOSS reader https://github.com/yang991178/fluent-reader

Im using Newsboat, it is pretty cool: https://newsboat.org/index.html

I use https://github.com/Rongronggg9/RSS-to-Telegram-Bot/

Since Google died I've been using selfoss. I haven't / hadn't been able to find the social features, and selfoss was just straightforward and solid.

Mozilla Thunderbird https://www.thunderbird.net, It's a good E-mail and RSS reader

Im using next cloud news(server and android app). It has a small bug with invisible text and some setting are forgotten over time, but else it is good enough,

Using https://www.inoreader.com Awesome basic free plan for personal usage

I use Read Copilot, I build it myself, I love the AI part of it because I have too many RSS feeds and most of them are not on my native language

Reeder, since the beginning. Technically it's a wrapper and behind the scenes I'm using Feedly. The experience is great so far

elfeed in emacs (https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed)

Read Copilot, I build it myself, I love the AI power part, because I have too many RSS feeds and most of them are not my native language

ttrss (https://tt-rss.org/) self hosted.

When Google Reader shut down I switch to feedly for a bit, don't remember now why but for some reason I didn't like it. So I started self hosting my own instance of ttrss and haven't looked back since.

- https://theoldreader.com/

Made my own, made it easy to add different type of clients (TUI, Android, Web) and display cleaned up articles.

I've been using Netvibes since 2008.

I second this - been using Netvibes since Google Reader went away. Clean interface and reasonably customizable. At the time, it was the closest to feature parity that I could find and I haven't felt the need to look for a replacement since.

https://readwise.io/read

On android, feeder v1.x. The v2 update changed the UI for the worse. The old version works wonderfully.

Used to like Feedly but their free plan is just too limited so I've been on Inoreader for years now.

I've been using Feedly on the free plan for years and I love it. What do you want that the free plan does not do?

Miniflux (hosted) + Reeder

Miniflux itself is an amazing small Golang app, that can be easily deployed through Docker.

ntfy.sh

I run the server on a RP4. It pushes the latest article/podcast to my phone via a cronjob running every 60 seconds. Each feed has its own channel. I also throw it into a postgres db on the same RP4 for posterity.

I wrote my own command line one called BMB (well, ChatGPT wrote most of it).

It's great!

Unread for iOS. I think it has the smoothest UI of any mobile feed reader.

Unread is now available for Mac as well. (Full disclosure: I am the developer.)

I made one called Stratum to fix some of the problems with other readers.

Google Reader (:/), then Digg (:/), and now Ino Reader

It used to be NetNewsWire, but now it's rss2email and fastmail.

Flym on Android. It's free, open source and has no ads.

Big fan of bazqux.com

I've been using it for quite a few years, works great. My only complaints are tiny nitpicks.

NetNewsWire is excessively good (Apple platforms only).

I use Inoreader for over 10 years now (free edition).

Inoreader (pro?) hands down.

I've been subscribed for probably 6+ years now. I've tried various others but this has the mix of power user and design. Great filters, newsletter sign ups, can get around most paywall.

feedly for the service part; gReader Pro for the UI (Android), as I don't like the Feedly app itself.

Inoreader.

i self host fressrss, and use reeder on ios and the browser elsewhere.

Another vote for self-hosted [miniflux](https://miniflux.app/) - and I use [focusreader](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=allen.town.foc...) on my phone to read from it.

Drop feeds on Firefox

Selfhosted miniflux.

Brief on Firefox.

Feedly. PERIOD.

Feedbro on FF

feeder + rssfilter.sgn.space

RSS Guard

newsboat

feedmail.org

bazqux

miniflux

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