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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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!).
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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 VPS (actually a single-file python script that generates rss feeds from other sources).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
- 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
[delayed]
[delayed]
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
+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.
+1 for NetNewsWire, truly delightful. I wish there was a Linux version.
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 ;)
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.
i'm interested in a chrome port!
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'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.
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
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
No mention of Elfeed or even Gnus?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Happy user of Flym, a free Android reader:
https://github.com/FredJul/Flym
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.
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?
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..
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
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.
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.
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
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!
Feeder is excellent.
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?
TIL everyone on HN has built an RSS reader.
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!
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.
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...
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
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'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
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
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.
Commafeed is also hosted at commafeed.com
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.
> A deep dive
can't we just call things "A thorough examination / analysis" anymore?
It's content marketing.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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
Various discussions around here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45466224
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45468320
FreshRSS is so good. Using it for webscraping and syncing with my android app.
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 VPS (actually a single-file python script that generates rss feeds from other sources).
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.
No tt-rss?
If people would only set their CORS headers, you could make a feed reader in a static web page.
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.
Try this too https://fraidyc.at/
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.
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
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.
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
If you're on iOS or MacOS I can highly recommend NetNewsWire (https://netnewswire.com/).
Linux :/ sorry…
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.
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.
Thunderbird handles youtube feeds just fine.
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...
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.
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 :)
> 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.