Hacker News Reader

Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

I still mourn the loss of Google Reader.

There are plenty of RSS reader apps, but there are very few with good cross-device sync - let alone self-hosted cross-device sync.

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I've been using one of the numerous "RSS to Email" programs for the past 20 years.

To me that's peak usability, I can use my mail workflow to have cross-device state, I can use my mail clients tagging and spam support to filter, and I have a reasonably good searching facility too.

Some sites only include "teasers" rather than full posts, but they're a minority.

I’ve setup a local RSSBridge instance and use its “CSS Selector Feed Expander” module to expand these feeds into full feeds.

They also have a public instance.

https://rss-bridge.org/

I don't think you could self-host Google Reader, so it sort of feels like these two sentences don't hang together.

It's more linked to there not being any / many high quality RSS reader applications, so the comment is talking about a feature, so it does make sense.

theoldreader was built to be as close as possible to Google Reader. And from an interface PoV it's really close. Problem is that without critical mass you can't do the social features.

Self plug: I use matcha[0] which produces markdowns which with icloud (or any other file sync service) automatically sync cross devices.

https://github.com/piqoni/matcha

Self-hosted FreshRSS + NetNewsWire, works like a charm.

Why do you add FreshRSS in instead of subscribing directly in NNW? (Real question, not leading.) What am I missing by not doing that?

> cross-device sync

FreshRSS acts first as your central backend to manage your subscriptions, refresh and read status.

You can use its web UI to act on it, or you can use any reader app you want (NNW, Reeder...)

Gotcha. I guess where our use cases differ is that I use only one RSS reader so don’t care about sharing its state with other readers. That’d be super handy if I did, though.

My main points for running a self-hosted RSS service are:

1. It updates the feeds even though I'm not online on any device - this is an issue if your only RSS reader is on a desktop you turn off. You might miss items on feeds that roll over after X entries

2. I can read from multiple devices.

I mainly read on my laptop, big screen for big articles and all that. But sometimes I want to check the feeds on my phone, but don't want to wade through 420 articles I've already read on my actual computer -> syncing with single source is essential.

3. I can easily run feed hydrators on the same machine as FreshRSS.

For example: My HN feed is automatically filtered by the hydrator based on comment count, vote count, key words etc. Stuff that's not in the feed. It also grabs the linked article's OpenGraph data and inserts it to the feed so that I can get a preview of the article without opening the link at all.

Been happy with Feedly for a long time across many devices.

Self-hosted is its own can of worms. Google Reader was not self-hosted either.

miniflux is pretty good. news.mystuff.net is pretty sweet.

I've been using Feedly ever since the death of Google Reader. If you ignore all the ai bullshit it's simple to use and I've had no issues with cross-device sync.

We used to live counting the days in awe for the surprisingly new Google invention or release.

Then, one by one, Google started killing more services than it was announcing (Wave, News, +, etc), and enshittifying with spyware those that were still up

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