The RSS feed reader landscape | Hacker News Reader

The RSS feed reader landscape

lighthouseapp.io

341 pointsdomysee203 comments

I still miss Google Reader. I loved the social aspects, where I could repost my favorite articles (with comments about them), and friends could easily subscribe to my feed and comment on my shares. It was a really great social network for sharing blog posts and articles. I credit the demise of Google Reader with a lot of the downfall of the Old Web.

Since then, social sharing platforms are motivated to keep you on their platform. I recently ran an experiment on Facebook, where I posted a link to a content creator's video on YouTube with a lot of my thoughts about it.

I then downloaded the same video from YouTube and uploaded it to Facebook (this particular creator didn't upload his content to Facebook directly), and posted the exact same text content (but this time, hid the link the the source video in a comment).

The post where I downloaded + reposted the video got about 1000x more views than the one where I linked to the source.

On top of that, Facebook will often hide the link to the source video unless I click "Show all comments" (rather than the default "Show most relevant").

Facebook deprioritizes (shadowbans?) posts that link off of their platform, and it starts feeling like a stagnant pond. It's frustrating that it's difficult to share insightful blog posts on that platform, and I'm feeling pretty done with it.

Getting a good RSS reader isn't the part that I'm looking for -- I want the easy social aspect that Google Reader and Google+ gave me.

Newsblur has a similar social feature

I suppose you could make your own "meta" rss feed today, where you repost interesting articles to this feed, wrapped in your comments.

Mastodon with build in RSS feeds, repost an article from an RSS feed and your repost is really just new mastodon post

> Facebook deprioritizes (shadowbans?) posts that link off of their platform

That tells you that's not what it's for. It would be like posting your resume on FB and LinkedIn and then pointing out that FB led to fewer job offers than LinkedIn. Different platforms, different purposes.

Have you tried Feedly or Inoreader or Flipboard or The Old Reader or any other RSS services that popped up after Google Reader was killed?

>That tells you that's not what it's for. It would be like posting your resume on FB and LinkedIn and then pointing out that FB led to fewer job offers than LinkedIn. Different platforms, different purposes.

Only insofar as the purpose of the platform is to generate ad revenue. The contents of the posts were semantically identical and they were made to the same platform; your example involves the same post to two different platforms.

> Only insofar as the purpose of the platform is to generate ad revenue.

Well, yeah. I'm not surprised that they don't promote posts containing links to their competitors.

I wonder what the outcome would have been if you had instead linked to Instagram or Threads? I would guess those have a smaller penalty.

Is your critique that it’s unsurprising? I agree, but the original comment was complaining about how this practice kills the feeling of older social platforms where you could share whatever with your friends.

> That tells you that's not what it's for. It would be like posting your resume on FB and LinkedIn and then pointing out that FB led to fewer job offers than LinkedIn. Different platforms, different purposes.

In this case, I made two copies of the same post on the same platform. The only difference was whether the contents of the post were hosted on FB or if they were hosted on a competitor's platform.

It's not a question of medium (LinkedIn vs. Facebook). It's a question of algorithmic prioritization within the same platform.

Facebook deprioritizes my posts when I include hyperlinks to external websites -- I suspect especially if those sites don't run Meta ads.

It was the same video with the same text. The only difference was a hyperlink.

I want to support bloggers and content creators that I like (on a variety of platforms). Facebook skewed their algorithm to disproportionately show content hosted on their domains. I understand why they do that (advertising $$$ and "engagement" metrics) -- I just don't appreciate what it does to the user experience.

> Have you tried Feedly or Inoreader or Flipboard or The Old Reader or any other RSS services that popped up after Google Reader was killed?

Yes -- I tried Feedly and Inoreader. Maybe I should give The Old Reader a shot?

The feed-reading part of those clones is fine -- but again, what I miss is the sharing and discussion that could happen so easily within my social network with Google+ and Google Reader. The RSS piece is almost the least important piece for me.

I used https://www.theoldreader.com/en/ for a long time before giving up on RSS. At the time it was the most similar to Google's.

Yeah, I moved to that once Bloglines went through enshittification/ being bought.

> I credit the demise of Google Reader with a lot of the downfall of the Old Web.

maybe you have causation wrong. social platforms were so effective they caused downfall of old web, and with it the demise of Google Reader

Google Reader was killed by Vic because it was the only "social" app at Google at the time. He wanted to grow their FB competitor (G+) and insisted on migrating users over from Reader to G+, which never happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Gundotra#Career

lmao thanks. you would think you should spin up the next thing first and migrate over rather than kill then spin up

Decentralized social RSS feed / article recommendations could totally happen if the community came up with a standard way to implement it.

Re-posting / paraphrasing a comment I made in a discussion about decentralized recommendation algorithms for RSS feed content:

People used to post a "blogroll" (and sometimes an OPML file) to their personal blogs showing the feeds they followed. That was one way to do decentralized recommendations, albeit manually since there was no well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files. If there was a well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files a client could build a recommendation graph.

OMPL files in well-known locations would be neat but would only provide feed-level recommendation. Article-level recommendation would be cooler.

One of the various federated/decentralized/whatever-Bluesky-is "modern" re-implementations of Twitter/NNTP could be used to drive article-level recommendations. My feed reader could emit machine-readable recommendation posts based on ratings I give while browsing articles. My feed reader could consume these recommendations from others, and then lots of fun could be had weighting recommendations based on social graph, algorithmic summary of the article body, trustworthiness of the poster, friend-of-friend status, etc.

I thought about some of this stuff back in '05 when I tried to contribute to ttrss. The maintainer didn't have much interest so I dropped it. I've thought about it periodically but never had the initiative to do anything with it.

Re: NNTP

Feedbase lets you add RSS/Atom feeds so you can read them with your favourite newsreader:

https://feedbase.org/

What if all we need is for bloggers to post a recommended feed with links to external posts in a separate RSS feed? The feed readers ingest the recommendation feeds and count them. I've been following ActivityPub and other protocols, by damn that stuff becomes a mess quick. The absolute simplest approach is probably the right one for now.

The fundamental problem with recommendation engines are the platforms are forcing content on the users based on what increases engagement (and possibly ad $) on their platform -- not what is valuable to the user.

If I'm following a particular blogger, and their signal to noise ratio is 9:1, if they recommend an article it would be vrey likely I am also interested in it. If I'm following a larger group of people, I may be interested, in aggregate, what they are interested in. All very basic stuff that seems to have been abused and forgotten. Other than e-mail, rss is the odd man out in 2025 which also makes it so much more valuable.

Any third party RSS feed service could ingest these feeds and spit out whatever other type of recommended feed they want. The could just view a hn/reddit style feed solely with counts of the people they want to follow along with "vote" counts and some decay algorithm. They could have a chronological feed that just shows everything. The users are in control again, not Meta/Facebook/IG, Reddit, Bytedance, or etc.

Basically linkblogging. I'm not sure this needs to be a separate feed; JSON Feed has a dedicated `external_url` field:

> If `url` [optional] links to where you’re talking about a thing, then `external_url` links to the thing you’re talking about.

I'd be shocked if Atom/RSS didn't have equivalents.

This kind of "repost"-ish behavior may just be obscured in the tools people use to construct feeds, so they remain obscure features of the standards. The designers had syndication in mind, very much like what you're describing — ingesting feeds, reprocessing/mixing/extending them, and exposing the result as another feed.

Replying to both your and parent post at once:

Using RSS for this seems reasonable for people who already have the ability to host a feed. I was thinking more about the Twitter-alikes for the "normies" who don't have a place to host a feed. I don't just want to see recommendations from bloggers. I'd like to be able to pull recommendations from a wider net of "content consumers" as well as "content creators".

I can't come up with an economic model that would work to run a hosting service for feedreader-generated feeds except in the case of for-profit feedreaders. There's abhorrent models there like, say, peppering the recommendation feeds with "sponsored content", or extracting demographic data from the participants and selling it. Making the recommendation feed a fee-based service also seems like a bad model, too.

That was why I look at the Twitter-alikes for the recommendation feeds-- because the transport is "free" (or, at least, not something where I'd have to worry about the business model).

The RSS spec has the 'source' sub-element, which should point to the original source feed to give credit while forwarding/reposting. I guess one can apply this spec loosely and point it to a webpage url instead of an RSS feed.

Shameless plug but you might enjoy the site I've been working on for the past few years: lynkmi.com

It's very much inspired by the earlier web and more recently especially catalysed by the trend you note of the big sites punishing doors to elsewhere. I remember a time when Facebook actually had a "links" section where you could see a list of all the cool stuff you had posted, so it's sad they've strayed so far.

Join the resistance! Every tag and profile automatically has an RSS feed too, and I just recently added internal backlinks which I'm enjoying a lot.

The easiest way to share good articles is to just write a short blog post about it

Yes, that's essentially what I want. With Google Reader, I liked how easily my reader and reblogger were integrated together with my social network, and linking to external sites wasn't penalized in the algorithm.

If you're in the Apple ecosystem (Mac, iPhone) NetNewsWire is an absolute delight. It's not a commercial product any more, Brent Simmons runs it as a (very serious) passion project. Here's a recent post by him explaining part of his philosophy for it: https://inessential.com/2025/10/04/why-netnewswire-is-not-we...

Crucially, it syncs feed read state between my laptop and phone.

+1 for NetNewsWire, truly delightful. I wish there was a Linux version.

I have used NetNewsWire since 2003.

Really.

It’s flawless. It just works. There are no gimmicks, there is no weird effort to gamify it into a social media play, it’s just a user-focused news reader. And that’s great.

This is what happens when a product isn't being invested in and tries to take over the world, inevitably resulting in its enshittification.

That's about when I started, if memory serves. GREAT software.

> Crucially, it syncs feed read state between my laptop and phone.

This is via iCloud and only works for iPhones/Macs. What’s great though is that NetNewsWire also supports RSS feed aggregators (I personally use FreshRSS) so that you can sync RSS read status over all your devices, even non Apple ones!

I’ve been tempted over the years to switch to other RSS apps, but this feature is what keeps me using NetNewsWire.

I use https://miniflux.app and use that to sync NetNewsWire across my devices and across RSS readers. I'm using Reeder on my iPad, Miniflux on the web and sometimes NetNewsWire on my Mac.

I used Reeder for a year, but switched to Miniflux because I wanted an RSS reader that could be used outside of my Apple devices. I do miss having a mobile app of my reader, since Miniflux can sometimes be hard to navigate on a mobile device. I never seriously considered using multiple readers until now. Thanks for the accidental recommendation.

+1 I use NetNewsWire as well.

In addition to sync by iCloud, you can also sync with a third-party aggregator (BazQux, Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader, NewsBlur, The Old Reader, or FreshRSS). This can be a good option if you sometimes need access from a non-Apple device.

NNW got me paying for my first RSS client. Reeder got me while it was semi-retired. I still have NNW installed just for nostalgia. Both are great and a solid RSS client is one of the first three apps I'd install on any / every device.

Just discovered it a few months ago after using Reeder 3 (no need to upgrade to 4).

Works perfectly with a self-hosted FreshRSS backend.

I use NetNewsWire as a frontend, and self-hosted FreshRSS as backend for sync and feed management. Works a treat across multiple devices, Mac/iOS/iPadOS and web.

I started out with NNW then went to Reeder when iPhone came out. Later on google shut down their endeavor and I became frustrated with all the *free* alternatives—luckily I stumbled across News Explorer which I believe was the first (or one of the first) to do iCloud syncing so I could ditch the middleman.

I suggested iCloud sync to Brent but was first rebuffed about the poor technical aspects and problems that it had. For those who remember the sentiment around that time was that iCloud sync was unreliable yet News Explorer was proof that it was working just fine.

Brent later backtracked for which I am very happy, I've been using NNW ever since.

I only wish it had RSS filtering to weed out the shitposts, I believe they're working on it. In the meantime I've been using Feed Rinse.

http://www.feedrinse.com/index-old.php

I used NNW for a LONG LONG TIME. It's great software.

There was a period when it was not as useful, though, and I migrated away, but I still think of it very fondly.

My current RSS consumption toolchain uses Feedbin as the back end / syncing host, and their web app is good enough that I no longer use a native tool on my Mac. On my phone and iPad I use Reeder.

I'll just shill my own feed reader here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re...

It currently only runs in Firefox but if anyone is interested, I'll Port it to Chrome since it now supports a sidebar interface.

I made this because I wanted to have feeds show up where I read them, in the browser, and I wanted it on my own device so nobody else controls it. No hosting, no payment, just a simple tool that lets me control what I read.

Bonus: if you try it you'll likely increase the global usage by double digits ;)

i'm interested in a chrome port!

Interested. I miss when Firefox sorted in natively, even if it was bare minimum. I've been looking for a lightweight RSS reader for desktop. I'd probably ditch my mobile app too if this was compatible with Firefox mobile.

FYI, it's quite easy to support both Firefox and chrome (both mv2 and mv3, even) in a single extension codebase.

Could it also be ported as a VSCode extension?

If you're doing your own reader, please check Rachel by the Bay's Feed Reader Score Project: https://rachelbythebay.com/fs/

And follow the best practices: https://rachelbythebay.com/fs/help.html

Basically you don't want to hammer the server every minute or even every day if the feed updates once a week. Use ETags and Last-Modified properly.

This is a nice overview but is also obviously content marketing for Lighthouse, which, fine.

I use Feedly, and generally like it, but the issue with RSS has very little to do with reader front ends and largely to do with how a lot of people don't publish full articles on RSS, images don't work, etc. The demo images of all the readers are like best case scenario - most non-personal sites only publish a paragraph or two, if that, making the reader more of a link aggregator.

I use feedly because it's where I landed after GReader; I don't love it, but it has worked continually without bothering me enough to think about it.

But one day I want to look into alternatives, and the number one thing in my wishlist is to be able to scrap sites that crop the full article in the feed. Going from the RSS client to the browser to the reader mode in the browser is such an absurd friction.

Edit: Well, after 12 years, that day ended up being today. I found a client called FeedMe that syncs with Feedly and can load the full article inside the client. It also has some other features that I was looking for, like filters. There might be more clients like that, but this is the first I found. I shouldn't have been so lazy all this time.

I use BazQux (https://bazqux.com/) as it was the closest to the old Google Reader I could find.

The developer also set up their own instance of FiveFilters Full Text Rss (https://www.fivefilters.org/full-text-rss/) for use with that reader to do fetch the content. I typically use this as proxy for any feeds I'm going to add where the author didn't provide the full text.

Other than that: * The BazQux web interface has a button to fetch the full text content of the article. * As you noted, FeedMe on Android can also switch to web mode to fetch full content.

I prefer the Five Filters way because then I can go through my feeds offline while in transit

Some readers can download the full article. I tried Miniflux a while back I think that one supports it.

It definitely does, I use it all the time.

> very little to do with reader front ends and largely to do with how a lot of people don't publish full articles on RSS, images don't work, etc.

That's exactly what some of the front ends help resolve - they parse the link to get the full content, some even for sites requiring login.

FreshRSS supports CSS selectors and others to get the full content.

I've also built a bunch of RSS feed hydrators myself where the process of getting content to the feed isn't as simple as "grab that bit of the page".

Like my HN feed uses Opengraph information from the linked article to fill in a picture and preview as well as the Algolia HN api to get scores and comment counts.

Although I've been an Inoreader user over the last few years, this year I switched to Miniflux. I felt like features/cost ratio for Inoreader finally tipped away from what I was interested in paying. Migrating to Miniflux was genuinely very easy-- spin up the docker compose, export OPML from Inoreader, import OPML to Miniflux. I use tsdproxy and tailscale funnels to get access to the web endpoint.

While I started out just using the webapp, I quickly discovered that there large number of Miniflux compatible applications. I eventually settled on:

- Read You on my Android Phone and Tablet https://github.com/ReadYouApp/ReadYou

- Reactflux (web) on my windows laptop https://github.com/electh/ReactFlux

- RSSGuard on my linux desktop https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard

- Reeder classic on iPad (I already owned this, might as well keep using it)

- PoweReader on my work iPhone https://powereader.app/

One neat thing about Miniflux is that it supports a number of APIs, including Fever and Google Reader. As long as your frontend works with one of these, you get a seamless experience. This level of choice is actually something I'm really enjoying-- I get a very native experience on whatever platform I use, as opposed to using the Inoreader app/website on each platform.

Appreciate the shout-out for PoweReader! I’m the developer. If anything feels off or you need help, please email me: support@powereader.app

I was wondering why Tiny Tiny RSS was missing as that's what I've been using for the last 10+ years. At the bottom of the article there's the explanation:

> On October 3rd the maintainer announced that he's going to stop working on it, and will remove all infrastructure on November 1st. Forks of the project with other maintainers may pop up, but at the moment it's too soon to tell what the future of Tiny Tiny RSS will be.

Various discussions around here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45466224

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45468320

A fork is on GitHub and the domain tt-rss.org points to it. It'll be interesting to see if it gets significant development work

The person who forked it (https://github.com/tt-rss/tt-rss) was very active on the original Tiny Tiny RSS development side as well as on the forums. I have a good feeling that this fork will work out just fine.

NetNewsWire is great, and the developer is just in it for the love of the game and the open web.

https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/T...

I have tried most of the RSS on the market, and for last three years i'm staying on BazQux.

I try to read everything on the internet via my reader so it is important to me that it:

1. can discover not so obvious feeds like youtube or reddit 2. makes rss feeds for non rss services — in the past it had feeds for twitter, vk and instagram that didn't provide feed. Sadly this is no longer a thing I beleive as such thing as social media public api dissappeared 3. can retreive full text of article

That said I believe you need to think of choosing of RSS reader as about choosing a mighty backend for the feeds. There is nothing difficult in rendering nice text from XML. Real difficulty is in making RSS avaliable on sites that are hostile to RSS (and will became more hostile in future).

And for the chosen backend, you can choose any frontend — just look at RSS apps in app store for your platform. Most of them will support using other backends. Reeder for Apple devices is nice.

Some links

https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS

https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds

My problem with most RSS do not have great search. With 500+ sources this can become problem.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - my own project

I really hope sites continue their RSS feeds. It seems like less and less of them have them available or don’t care to keep them updated.

You can usually find a feed in google. Some people make feeds by crawling sites.

Yeah that’s true. I also built a couple feeds for some sites I use that have an API but no feed.

Newsboat + miniflux is an excellent combination if you're CLI-addicted but want to access feeds from multiple devices.

For all the (justifiable) concern about the death of RSS, we have a glut of excellent options for consuming content through RSS. But I'm still sour about the Reeder redesign. At least the dev was transparent about building the tool he wanted to use but, ugh, it's barely in the same market as the others now.

I never upgraded to Reeder 4, stuck with 3 until I found (rediscovered?) NetNewsWire and connected it to my FreshRSS instance.

I've been using newsboat for years. I've thought about trying out miniflux for a while, but a few days ago I got a different idea.

First, the newsboat DB is SQLlite so it's easy to access. I wrote a few scripts that built static HTML pages of all of the feeds along with a feed style page. I copied the HN page html/CSS, which to me feels like the maximum compact view while still being readable.

Now I have a bash script that will refresh all of the newsboat feeds and then open the static HTML page in the default web browser.

Thinking a lot about the impact of "vibe" coding recently made me wonder why anyone needs to be locked in to not just a set UI but any sort of rigid external control of how the user sees and interacts with information.

I want to see all my news chronologically. Now in a single place I have hn, lobste.rs, numerous twitter/x feeds, mastodon, and a lot of other blogs all visible chronologically. If someone was noisy I could apply keyword filters to the feeds and block certain things out. If I wanted to, I could put this on a server and access it through my phone.

This was definitely "the easy" way to do this. You could raise $1 million and do the same thing the hard way.

Unless I misunderstand, it also misses that Newsblur is open source and can be self hosted https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

They also have a free tier for the hosted version that is pretty generous (64 sites). I used the free hosted version for years after Reader went away and only upgraded as a way to support software that I use and enjoy regularly.

Just gonna join the many other commenters shilling their favourite, mot mentioned rss reader!

I absolutely love Vore (the rss reader, not the other thing!!!) It's really simplistic, and beautifully refuses to do anything I don't want it to.

https://vore.website/

author here, glad u enjoy my lil project! lmk if there's anything you'd like to see.

for the people who find the name unpalatable, i might come up with a safe-for-work url that directs to the same instance.

Ah hey! I love it, and wouldn't change anything, in fact I'd be dissapointed if a whole load of features did get added! Thanks for keeping it going - it's a rare piece of small-web coolness in an internet.

Here is my "rss reader" https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/news/

I wanted to have a list of latest posts of blogs I follow and that I can access it quickly from both PC and mobile phone without any signing in. Then I decided to do it myself like that. There is a github workflow that runs automatically every 6 hours and updates that page.

I opened your page. 5 posts by Simon Willison and 8 by other authors. A comment by Simon Willison underneath this comment as well (now the top comment on the thread).

Simon's spam game is CRAZY. There's a million blogs out there but over half of the posts on your reader are him. Why bother? You can't get away from him here or on lobsters even if you want to -- why further flood your subscriptions with his slop?

I don't understand how he has such a grip on you people. The Andrew Tate of AI bros.

I see, but yes and no. He is maybe the most active among them, but for that precise reason (I have it from the beginning, not after I stared reading his blog :)) I show only last 5 posts of each blog, to not pollute that list. This way everyone has a chance to stay longer on that list.

FeedFlow (all platforms and can be synced over freshRSS) https://github.com/prof18/feed-flow

Would be cool if lawnchair for android could integrate RSS as news feed..

Yes, like 95% of commenters here, I also have an RSS reader. Mine is kinda social (you can follow people and see their subscriptions in your feed), and also has full-text search and “related” recommendations. I also curate and grow a directory of human-written personal blogs: https://minifeed.net

Due to the nature of the medium, the majority of blogs in the directory and technical.

This is cool — I love it-- the layout and list of the people. Your OMPL list is awesome. I am also working in a similar direction. Right now, I am following only a few people in my RSS feed, so your list is really helpful.

What’s missing are the email digest services. I built a simple little service that sends rss digests to my email: https://pico.sh/feeds

Check it out

Not a user (yet) but just want to say I concur that email is the best medium for RSS feeds, so kudos.

I disagree, I use RSS so I don't need to clog up my email with feeds or sure updates, etc. I flat out refuse to sign up for mailing lists for the same reason. RSS is the perfect solution.

I probably should’ve qualified the “best medium” with something more specific. But I’ll submit two reasons why email is best for me and maybe some others:

- Email is the one thing that isn’t tied to any platform and ~always works, so it’s worth it to put in some effort into managing subscriptions / filters / labels / etc knowing that they will pay off indefinitely.

- It’s nice to consume content in the original format intended by the author, so I prefer receiving an article link in the email with a preview, and clicking through to read it. A dedicated reader invariably has problems rendering non-text content and doesn’t have all the features of a browser.

A bit of a self-promotion, but relevant. I've been working on a TUI feed reader that stores all articles locally in Markdown in a filesystem structure, similar to what Obsidian does, if anyone's interested: https://github.com/CrociDB/bulletty

Going to shill for Feedbin (https://feedbin.com). I switched to this in 2012 when Reader blew up and it has remained a consistently excellent product since then.

I use the web client, and on iOS I use Reeder app to access Feedbin. Ben even published the a Feedbin API¹, which I wrote a Feedbin client for vintage computers (I called Mosaicbin)². I even use it for YouTube subs as of this year and it ingests them perfectly (and can filter Shorts).

I'm still on the original pricing but would happily pay $5/mo current price if it came to that. It's a product that would leave a huge void in my life if it ever disappeared.

¹ - https://github.com/feedbin/feedbin-api

² - https://github.com/jonpurdy/mosaicbin

I second this recommendation!

I joined later than you: May 2013. If it really was 2012 when Google Reader blew up, I can't remember what I used before finding Feedbin. Maybe Feedly, maybe something else that came and went or maybe even a local reader...

For Android users, I recommend "Capy Reader" as a client.

Correction, Google announced shutting down Reader in 2013. IIRC Feedbin was created at the same time in response to that. So we were both likely among the first users.

We're mostly on the same page. I moved to Feedbin after GR went away.

I also use Reeder on iOS but am happy with the Feedbin web app on my Mac.

Feedbin is a service I'm 100% happy to pay for.

Okay this is a thinly veiled ad for Lighthouse, and a clever attempt at getting backlinks, SEO value, etc.

So my real question is what is the value of Lighthouse compared to Feedly or Inoreader?

I’ll add https://github.com/stringer-rss/stringer to the self-hosted list. It is my reader of choice since I think over ten years. Never had the feeling of looking for another one.

it made my day to see this comment, i was the original creator, awesome to see people still using it!

I stopped all social media a while ago. Unless you consider hackernews, reddit, etc. social media. I always considered these news aggregators/forums as different but I digress.

I recently wondered how my perspective would change if I cut that out too. Would my understand of "what really happened" change? Would my worldview change? I already find myself disagreeing with "my" groups fairly frequently but still, I wonder what different conclusions I would come to if I just consumed the primary sources. Of course the source will matter ideally I could read a wide variety of sources on the same story.

For some reason I never thought about RSS. But its the perfect tool for the job.

It does raise a question if there's such a thing as a "minimum effective dose" of news consumption, and diminishing returns at certain thresholds of consumption. For instance, is one RSS feed with NYT headlines perhaps comprehensive enough that it is 90% functionally equivalent to a more voracious habit of reading diverse sources, subject matter expert blogs and so on?

That is a good question and I had the same thought while constructing it. Almost like stock market diversification. You can represent the entire market pretty well with just a handful of stocks.

However, this seems like an overwhelmingly NO:

>is one RSS feed with NYT headlines perhaps comprehensive enough that it is 90% functionally equivalent to a more voracious habit of reading diverse sources, subject matter expert blogs and so on?

The NYT, and pretty much all publications, reflect a singular editorial perspective. I think at minimum you would want 1 left, 1 right, and 1 center.

>I think at minimum you would want 1 left, 1 right, and 1 center.

Probably a convo for a different place and time, but strong disagree here. Calibrating relative to political polarization is relativism, and I'm not a relativist.

Nor am I. I think we have a misunderstanding on the goal. My goal is to get a wide range of perspectives.

How did you interpret the goal? Perhaps the widest range of topics? Most closely aligned editorial viewpoint?

I interpret the goal as being interested in truth. An approach to truth that identifies it with diversity of viewpoints is epistemological relativism. Instead you should look for things like strong journalistic practices and institutional track record.

I bit of out-topic, but the best recommendation that I had here in HN was definitely the FreshRSS [1].

Yes, the design sounds _phpish_, but on Docker it's so reliable and fast, that I feel that I am in some sort of "final version of the software" and not needing anything else or enhancements, like WinRar, Notepad.exe, Winamp, Nero Burning ROM, Windows XP, etc.

I do not know if others have the same feeling about a software that works so great, that _any_ update will be a downgrade given the high level of contentment and satisfaction.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18097105

I can second the recommendation for FreshRSS- it's incredibly utilitarian and I have no complaints. I've been using it for about 4 years. It's how I came to this thread!

Couldn't agree more about the "final version" sentiment: my self hosted instance sat there for the first two years, untouched, working flawlessly and used daily. It's only when I switched server hardware that I actually performed an upgrade to the latest version, pleasantly surprised to find that there were no major changes (minor QoL patches only) and everything just worked.

Agree, i’ve also been running it for years. It’s stable and has great features like CSS selectors, filtering, sharing as rss feed, etc.

I’m disappointed in the article but watching RSS for 25 years (declared dead for most of them) have gotten me used to disappointment. It just seems like every discussion about RSS starts as if it was some brand new thing and not if we didn’t have 25 years of experience with it.

The article makes a matrix out of the least important attributes of the product (free vs hosted) and has nothing at all to say about: (1) user interface and (2) architecture.

(2) of course puts constraints on (1) but gets you to the heart of the RSS predicament. It is possible in principle for an RSS reader to be completely stateless, that is you could make an HTML page with some JavaScript in it that reads an OPML file and then hits all those RSS feeds and formats them somehow. Or you could write some scripts that do the same with curl. [1]

The stateful system has a lot of advantages, particularly that the state never gets corrupted because it doesn’t exist. If you could add some simple and reliable layer that dealt with the worst of the polling problems with a cache then you could still stay pretty simple.

Past that though the architecture could get complex pretty quick in that you may want to reify feed items and store them in a database, keep track of whether you read something or not, run queries against the feed, run a recommender against the feed, etc.

[1] … if your cache mechanisms will protect you from polling some people’s RSS feeds too fast. Maybe you’re better off if they block you.

> [1] … if your cache mechanisms will protect you from polling some people’s RSS feeds too fast. Maybe you’re better off if they block you.

They do, just use `--etag-save` and `--etag-compare` and curl does proper caching, since 2020: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2019/12/06/curl-speaks-etag/

I have dabbled with replacing my RSS reader with something like this, but haven't done it, yet.

I was recently looking at using Nushell to do the same thing. Nushell can natively do almost all you need for this.

TIL everyone on HN has built an RSS reader.

If it hasn't already been mentioned huge fan of newsboat paired with Lynx in the terminal. Travels easily and with lynx browser kinda brings me back to a more focused reading experience.

Claude Code built me a custom RSS feed reader in just an hour or so. I wanted a simple list of unread posts, which would be auto-deleted when I clicked on them to read them. It took less than 24 hours to go from "ok I'll try to make this" to having it up and running "in production" on my home server.

AI could be a real game changer for anyone who runs their own server or homelab. If you can't find a reader you like, just make one! It's not that hard these days.

Anybody know of a self-hosted RSS reader that can remember different views for different folders?

I'm using Inoreader which does that - I have a folder that is displayed as titles only, and a different one that displays as "cards".

I've tried a few of the more famous self-hosted ones, but none of them have that feature. I know that a keyboard shortcut can be used to change views, but my early-morning doomscrolling brain doesn't want to think about that.

When Google Reader closed I started using The Old Reader and then after 3 or 4 years jumped to Inoreader.

I've been using it since then without paying anything and it works ok.

Happy user of Flym, a free Android reader:

https://github.com/FredJul/Flym

I've been enjoying TT-RSS, though I do miss when the mobile app companion for it actually worked well. The web interface does work fine, and it does integrate with other local readers (such as newsboat), and allows for a centralized database so that I'm not stuck filtering what I've read on my desktop vs what I've read on my phone.

I used Feeder on my Android phone for the longest time. Recently set up a NixOS server and enabled FreshRSS on it, with FocusReader as the Android client. It is very nice to manage feeds on a server and have the read/unread status sync across devices.

If you have only used device-local readers before and have a server to spare, I recommend at least trying it!

I have freshrss on a VPS and use the web interface as my client on computers and my phone. Is FocusReader a big upgrade over the native web experience?

Feeder is excellent.

One of the "I wish I'd paid for premium sooner" services I use is Newsblur. The UI is not the most modern, but it centralizes, organizes, offlines, etc with enough power features to handle edge cases that I can feel like I "read everything today" the way I used to with Google Reader.

+1 on Newsblur. I use it every day and it has flaws but nothing that really gets in my way.

Big fan of https://github.com/synzen/MonitoRSS, not mentioned in the article. I self host at home and it sends feed updates to my own Discord server. I appreciate the customization for how the feed notification appear in Discord.

After about a decade of experimentation (NetNewsWire, Feedbin, Miniflux...), I'm self-hosting a feed reader I wrote myself, running on a free hosted LibSQL db.

- NetNewsWire was slick, but wouldn't work on my phone.

- Feedbin was excellent, but eventually I decided to do some subscription cost-cutting.

- Miniflux worked fine, but 1) I found it a pain to set up with remote hosted Postgres and 2) it burned through the Neon free-tier usage limits in a couple days.

So I built one myself and run it on a Raspberry Pi home server.

Made a great little weekend project. The feed standards are known quantities, so a little AI assistance with boilerplate goes a long way.

Deciding you need a new feature and just adding it is refreshing — e.g. I wanted a "read it later" feature like Feedbin's (something missing from Miniflux), and now I have it.

I've been a big fan of Iconfactory's Tapestry for a while now. It supports RSS, plus a bunch of custom connectors for non-RSS things. You could write your own to pull down whatever random thing you wanted, like GitHub Actions outputs or screenshots of your home webcam.

I don't know if it's permanently dead or not but I really like QuiteRSS:

https://github.com/QuiteRSS/quiterss

Last update was 4 years ago; I don't know if this means the project is dead or merely "done." One of the last features added was the ability to share a news item to Hacker News:

https://github.com/QuiteRSS/quiterss/issues/1084#issue-33248...

I have used this app on Windows and macOS; I've installed it on Linux but I don't do daily work on Linux so I don't know if it's stable there or not.

Check on RSSGuard, I checked a few weeks ago after another reccomendation here, and the dev was working on importing the QuiteRSS sqlite db.

It seems he has already completed it? I'll try to migrate this weekend then https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard/issues/1707#issueco...

Self plug: I wanted to have RSS feeds on my browser new tab page along with other widgets, and there weren't that many great options for what I wanted out of a new tab page; so i created my own! https://newtabwidgets.com.

I find the new tab page to be the ideal location for RSS feeds as I can quickly see new updates each time I open a new tab (which is quite frequently!).

It's on the Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/new-tab-widgets/ejn...

I doubt this actually exists, but does anyone know of an RSS reader that is cross platform, open source, and can sync between multiple devices via syncthing?

I already sync notes, e-books, etc, via syncthing on Android and Linux. RSS is one place where I have yet to find an option.

I recently enabled RSS for my own blog¹ and found it very frustrating getting the images/thumbs to display properly. The reason it was frustrating is the aggressive caching by the RSS readers. I had to debug it on a bunch of different readers, then once it was finally working change the URL of my feed to force them all to refresh.

The RSS feeds are surprisingly non-standardized for the media content extensions, even a simple thumbnail.

[1] https://www.jasonthorsness.com at https://www.jasonthorsness.com/rss.xml

RSS specifically or does the Atom standard also fail?

Didn’t try Atom; just generated RSS based on the spec and examples that worked in the readers I tried

I've found RSS Guard a few months ago, and it has finally replaced the gap that existed since Google Reader. It's cross-platform, which is a nice bonus, it works like a classic Windows program, which is a great plus because the modern RSS readers have a terrible UX because right click doesn't work, shortcuts don't work, etc.

The only thing I miss is that I want it to keep an OPML file up-to-date so I can autosync it to a repo, but it doesn't, so I have to export the OPML file sporadically. It's acceptable.

I was looking into this a few days ago, but was having a hard time finding an RSS reader that was desktop software and handled Youtube feeds. I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t tied to a SaaS or required hosting online.

Thunderbird handles youtube feeds just fine.

If you're on iOS or MacOS I can highly recommend NetNewsWire (https://netnewswire.com/).

Seconded. I've been using NetNewsWire for a couple of decades, and it does the unglamorous job of displaying feeds without ads, nags, or feature churn.

Linux :/ sorry…

What readers have you tried? What do you mean by "handled YouTube feeds". YouTube feeds just work as far as I am aware, they are fairly regular feeds. Are you expecting something in particular?

Requirements:

- Linux support

- doesn’t make me click a link and load the video in the browser, but plays in app

Akregator on KDE Plasma doesn’t support this, but you’d think “video/podcast” support would be a feature listed in the bullets of the feed reader software. A lot of the readers I looked at did not have it listed on a quick glance.

You can set this up today with newsboat, if you are fine with writing a small helper script that will parse browsing links for "youtube" string and open them directly in mpv. There are a bunch of examples of these sorts of scripts on peoples githubs where they already went through the trouble of writing regex for video and image file links (beyond just youtube) for you. You then add a line in the newsboat config file to set the default browser to your helper script.

I extended one to include opening rss subscribed reddit links in rtv in my terminal window, for example.

I believe yarr fills all your requirements. Can run as standalone on linux, and if you click "read here" the video gets embed. Assuming an extra click is not disqualifying. Note I have not verified this because I host it on a VPS.

https://github.com/nkanaev/yarr

Commafeed is also hosted at commafeed.com

My 2¢: Feedly's free plan is great and their web UI awesome. The features I want from the pro plan do not warrant the price.

I've switched to using Feedbin. I don't mind paying for it even though I could keep using Feedly for free, but the web UI ads annoyed me enough to look elsewhere.

The best Apple app is easily Unread, both for UI and UX. It still is t perfect for me, but the problems are minor and the author pleasant to interact with.

Happy daily user of FeedBro in Firefox here. I've been using it for 3 years and it's exactly what I expect it to be. It just goes.

FeedBro is also a recommended extension.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...

I use this. I don't understand why anyone wouldn't just have the application work in the browser, unless it's on mobile.

The author of Reeder has another RSS app that’s focused on recipes called Mela [1]. I’ve been using Reeder (the one-time payment version) and Mela for years and highly recommend both.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mela-recipe-manager/id15484660...

I was surprised not to see the one I use daily, Brief. Maybe it's not on Chrome or something, but it hasn't failed me in like decades.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/

Sad that my feed reader browser extension is not on the list. It is quite feature complete:

https://blogcat.org

The author says they only found one browser extension that was a feedreader, that is not the case. So I'm posting here in case anyone else is looking for that type of solution.

I've been using Docker containers for RSS Bridge and FreshRSS on my local machine, which has been a game changer, particularly with regards to following certain TikTok creators via RSS, meaning I can ignore the algorithm altogether. I wish it were more stable, however, the TikTok feeds can break from time to time...

Super cool to be able to get TikTok feeds. Getting social media feeds in general in feed reader seems great.

I would like an headless RSS feed aggregator that stores (and categorizes?) feeds and articles in a DB and exposes a rich API.

Miniflux is close, it has a minimal ui, but it also has a full api.

I've been using it for a few years and it's pretty great.

Tt-rss

Liferea looks too old, has a lot of bugs... But man that thing makes me happy, just headlines and click what I want to read.

What bugs did you have ? I am still using it and am very happy with it.

If you are in the Apple ecosystem I recommend News Explorer. It has a very nice interface and it syncs with your iCloud. It is a one-time payment of $4.99.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/news-explorer/id1032668306

Seconded, it's awesome.

I've been using Feedbin basically since Google Reader died. There are many feedbin compatible clients.

I'd probably honestly like to move to something self-hosted, but afaik there is no way to export the read status of individual feed items. OPML is just a list of feeds and their URLs, not their individual item history.

I use Reeder Classic on Mac and iOS, synced via Feedly. I also use the Feedly app on Android and the web app on Windows, but this article made me discover folo.is, which could probably unify my experience across all these platforms. I’ll give it a try.

Try this too https://fraidyc.at/

Here is a terminal based reader that I recently created as an alternative to newsboat https://github.com/jarv/newsgoat

It has some features that I felt was missing from the terminal based readers out there already.

This just reminded me of Teletext!

Article feels AI generated and misses some big ones. Given that this is advertising for their product, I don’t feel like this is actually useful (meaning unbiased and comprehensive) content for anyone who wants to figure out what RSS reader fits their needs.

> A deep dive

can't we just call things "A thorough examination / analysis" anymore?

It's content marketing.

I'm still on Carmen's Headline Viewer. I see no reason to swtich.

Ha! I started with CHV, then moved to Bloglines, then to Google Reader, then to NewsBlur, then to TT-RSS, then to Feedly, then to Inoreader, where I've stayed since 2016. I get an itch every time one of these RSS discussions happens, but it passes.

If you're looking for an on-device terminal feed reader, here's mine: https://github.com/ckampfe/russ

Some folks seem to like it.

I use the old Reeder still (don’t care for the new one at all, it’s pretty crappy and the subscription has zero value for me), and NetNewsWire is still not as slick on iOS, but the piece is largely on point.

Also on the old Reeder (v5), with a local FreshRSS as the back-end. It's fantastic on Mac, iOS and iPadOS, and I have no desire to move to the new Reeder or any alternative.

Same.

I'm happy to just use Feedly.

Keeps my feeds in sync between the mobile app and the web site, has pretty good keyboard shortcuts, mostly just gets out of the way, doesn't have ads I'm not sure what else I'd need

a RSS reader should allow for quick view of titles & summaries so you can decide to click through or not, inoreader free version scratches that itch. Don't need any fancy features, or social stuff. sure it's not self hosted, but it's just a collection of rss feeds, if it's down for a while, nothing big of value was lost, a small ompl backup of the feeds is all you need to get started elsewhere, self hosted or not.

no mention of rss via email?

https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email https://pypi.org/project/rss2email/

i have been using this for 20 years already. by now my own version has accumulated a few custom patches. but the original it is still under active development/support. some day i need to submit my changes upstream.

I have my own custom perl script which basically does the same which I've been using for probably a similar amount of time. Never used a dedicated RSS reader. My feeds just get turned into email and dropped into the appropriate folder thanks to my sieve filters. Can read/delete things from any of my email clients. Absolutely no need for a dedicated RSS reader.

I use https://blogtrottr.com/ and forward things to my email.

Was surprised to see no mention of it here.

I pay for both Feedly and Inoreader. I can't seem to break away from Feedly's multi-inner-tab reading features, but I like Inoreader's tagging/sorting.

Some very important criteria, more than the hosting itself, is if the feeds can be accessed from multiple devices (desktop, mobile, tablet, commandline?, ...)

Agreed. The list would be more useful if it included that.

No wonder they did everything they could to hide RSS from the masses: it's such a shame that users control their own feeds rather than their obscure algorithms.

I just made a python script that I keep running that updates when there is a new post from one of my feeds. Feed list is stored locally.

You should post the repo/gist

There's very few things an AI agent can easier make than an rss reader. Just do it, customize it to your liking and finished...

Just write your own RSS feed reader; it can be done easily in [relatively] few lines of JavaScript.

I built an RSS reader in 2005. I never figured out how to 100% reliably detect already downloaded articles.

This is one place where AI could actually help.

yarr is a fantastic selfhosted reader

This is what I'm using right now. I like that it has a built-in "reader mode" where it fetches the target article from the website and removes all the crud.

But I do have a wishlist of creature-comfort items that would probably never make it in:

* I go days/weeks without reading anything and trying to find out where I left off is a big pain. There doesn't seem to be a way to sort chonologicaly (only reverse).

* The only difference between read/unread items is a tiny gray dot in front of the article title. (I'd rather have the unread items stand out more from the read ones, with a different background, bold text, etc.)

* It would be nice to have a per-feed setting of whether to show the article as it appears in the RSS feed, or go fetch it from the web in reader mode.

Counterpoint, I've been using yarr almost daily for about a year and I can't say I share any of your wishlist items. I love how simple and elegant it is, and anything that makes the UI more complex or distracting would only take away from that.

I run it on a VPS so I can access it from phone+laptop and it looks great everywhere. I've only "augmented" it by throwing a basic rss bridge on the same server (well, the bridge is really single-file python script that generates rss feeds from other sources).

If people would only set their CORS headers, you could make a feed reader in a static web page.

No mention of Elfeed or even Gnus?

Anyone used snarfer back in the day? I loved it,was native and light, no bloat.

FreshRSS is so good. Using it for webscraping and syncing with my android app.

happy freshrss user here, the mobile web interface is a bit annoying, readera is fine. but it's so fast compared to use other things... (hosted on a old rpi3)

> Their main purpose is enabling their users to consume content

Here we go again... no, "consume content" is what the commercial social networks want you to do so you stick around until the next ad break. (Maybe even what a commercial SaaS RSS reader wants you to do so you pay the next bill.)

I use RSS specifically to get away from generic "content". Instead I read to learn things, and to explore opoinions I might not otherwise come in contact with, and to socialise with other people.

"Everything Is Content Now" by Patrick (H) Willems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAtbFwzZp6Y

It bugs me too when actual humans adopt soulless management-speak about "content" traveling from "producer" to "consumer." (The words don't even make sense: when you consume food, it's gone; when you observe text, an image, or video, it's still there.) I use RSS to keep up with other people who "emit content" at irregular intervals.

No tt-rss?

No tt-rss? Weird.

tt-rss was discontinued a few days ago: https://community.tt-rss.org/t/the-end-of-tt-rss-org/7164

The domain now points to a GitHub project. It'll be interesting if enough Devs pick up the work

The code still works.

Yeah but it won't get updates, security fixes, etc. if no one maintains it. You don't want to run an ancient PHP version that parses arbitrary input.

It still lives as a fork: https://github.com/tt-rss/tt-rss/wiki

Feedly's bullshit about AI and enterprise "insights" is incredibly irritating. Like, I read articles about cooking and math. Why would I want AI-powered security insights? Why would anyone want them, for that matter? It seems incredibly... clueless.

>Like, I read articles about cooking and math. Why would I want AI-powered security insights? Why would anyone want them, for that matter?

It's government's social program.

Most people are so ignorant about digital security that governments force media providers (social media, newspapers, bloggers) to make native content about how to not tell your bank password to a random person on the internet.

What are you talking about?

Isn't this just marketing AI slop? There is no real structure, several readers are described with more details, others aren't. At the end there is an ad for Lighthouse.

Many links shared on HN are content marketing for various companies. In this case it's a good start for a discussion and sharing RSS tool that are not listed on that list.

Another free one http://gitHub.com/lallassu/gorss :)

Newsraft! https://codeberg.org/newsraft/newsraft

It is the Trump of RSS readers!

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