Using Thunderbird for RSS
rubenerd.com
rubenerd.com
Different UIs aside, one of the issues I kept having was that some of my feeds wouldn't load because sites now have a bot/scrapping/AI protection in place (Cloudflare, Anubis, etc), breaking RSS readers. And that was with a residential IP, it was even worse if I routed traffic via a popular VPS or VPN provider.
I guess this will affect some users more than others depending on what we subscribe to, but I decided to keep using Feedly (for now at least).
At this point the main reason I stay on Feedly is their ability to handle fake email subscriptions into their RSS format. So many blogs and other places don't provide RSS anymore :(
I only use real RSS feeds, so I'm not sure if there's an open source alternative that can replace Feedly for sites that don't have a feed.
For small blogs, especially those I sometimes find here on HN, usually they'll add a feed if you ask them. Sometimes it's just something they forgot to enable in their site generator or maybe they already have a feed, but it's a weird URL and it's not declared in the HTML. In my case it helps that the small blogs I follow are often from people that avoid social media, like to host their stuff, etc, and see the benefits of following sites via feeds.
But the lack of simple cross-device sync killed the experiment for me. If you read a few articles on your phone while commuting, your desktop client has no idea when you get home. It is a great setup if you only ever consume news at one desk, but I ended up just sticking with Miniflux so my unread counts stay sane.
There is an open source service named gpodder.net (web app, not the client app) that does this for podcasts. It doesn't just sync post read status, it can also sync added podcast feeds across supported clients on all devices.
Since podcasts are based on RSS feeds, this shows that what you seek is possible with regular feeds too. I don't know yet how gpodder does it, but that should be easy enough to find out because the web app seems to have good documentation in addition to being open source.
However, looking at the RSS and Atom feed formats, they seem to include some variation of a uuid per story. This is like message-ids in emails and should be useful in cross-device post status sync. This could be what gpodder uses for sync. A similar service for regular feeds would be easy enough to make. But it would need support across feed readers too, like how several podcast clients support gpodder.
> It is a great setup if you only ever consume news at one desk, but I ended up just sticking with Miniflux so my unread counts stay sane.
I'm considering deploying an aggregator too. So I'm curious. What made you settle with miniflux?
Not sure quite what's going on with that project but when I looked - gpodder.net was a subscription service and the foss project was somewhat hidden and renamed as mygpo. Felt a bit suss and abandoned although I guess an rss server could just be "done".
There is also opodsync that seems to be a bit more alive and popular and says it's gpodder compatible. Not tried it though.
My enthusiasm to self-host my podcast/rss feed was killed dead when I gave nextcloud another go since it can apparently do this. Every few years I set it up having forgotten that the last time I did, I swore to never touch it again. I can't believe it's still such a bad experience.
It works but trying to make something that scales to a lot of users is technically really hard.
Initially it was client only, but you can't really do that with rss due to cors issues. You have to proxy the feed downloads..
Anyway, I have a working prototype I'm just trying to fix bugs now so I can start showing it to people. Taken me a year almost to get this far
I might take a stab at customizing the UI a bit. I like that it's opinionated but pretty bare-bones visually out of the box.
This is a good idea. I use Thunderbird only for a small number of feeds I want to read every post from. I used to also use a separate feed reader for my "river of news", but eventually I stopped looking at that and just loadded hackernews or reddit when I wanted a distraction. But I might try Thunderbird for more feeds and just auto-mark most of them as read so I can browse at my leisure.
Assuming you don't need syncing across devices, the main drawback to self-hosting is that it only receives updates while your PC is switched on. Some feeds update often enough that you'll miss stories if you don't grab them multiple times per day.
The android app isn't maintained at the moment but it's still one of the best rss apps I have ever used
That said as always with software your mileage may vary.
The Read you app looks promising, if a bit different workflow wise. I'll give it a shot with the Fresh API plugin. Thanks!
That said I use a healthy dose of custom css for it on computer, and access it via netnewswire on mobile. Cant speak for any the official apps but at least you can get TT-RSS to speak just about every flavour of RSS API.
Or I don't know how
I'm working on my own app and it solves that. Hopefully I'll share it soon.
Well I, for one, find the honesty refreshing.
Someone else mentioned Miniflux, which I've been testing for a few weeks on a local, tailscale-connected debian box. I really like it so far, with only a few minor complaints. It seems to embrace Dave Winer’s "river of news" idea that the author mentions. When I open my Miniflux homepage, I see the latest posts and I'm not distracted by older posts that I might not be concerned about.
That said, I categorize my feeds and treat the categories differently. Dev/design/DIY -- I tend to read all/most of it.
Like you, I was consuming RSS through Thunderbird around that time as well and thought it was really good. I have since moved to something else(many times) as my needs have changed.
In the spirit of HN, the poster maybe wanted a discussion of how the use of RSS has declined and walled gardens took its place which is not good for the longevity and usefulness of knowledge.