I am trying to move away from social media this year, read more news to stay informed and self-host more services. So I figured RSS is the best path forward, but I’m struggling to find a good configuration for my needs, so I thought I’d start a discussion. Also open to any feed recommendations.

I started with Hoarder, which I’m enjoying, but it feels like a solution best used for saving sites/images for reference and not day to day reading. Installed FreshRSS yesterday and absolutely loving it, the web interface is really nice. But I’ve not found an iOS app I like, I’ve got NetNewsWire installed, but it doesn’t seem to acknowledge the Visibility setting in FeshRSS. Which is my favorite setting, I’d like to have some feeds excluded from the main feed (BBC News or DEV.to for example). Maybe there is another way to achieve this with FreshRSS and NetNewsWire.

Any FreshRSS tips?

How do you do RSS personally and any iOS app recommendations?

Also any favorite feeds, I’ve currently got Hackaday, Hacker News, Ars Technica and self.st. I’d like more coding and 3D suggestions, but I’m open to anything.

  • Matt The Horwood@lemmy.horwood.cloudEnglish
    41·
    14 days ago

    I use nextcloud for a lot of stuff, so added the news app. In that I have a lot of GitHub repos I want to know get updated and things like the register and BBC news UK.

    Edit: that also have a mobile app for just the RSS feeds

  • Father_Redbeard@lemmy.mlEnglish
    27·
    14 days ago

    Miniflux is great. I use Wallabag as my read it later app and selfhost both on a cheap VPS. They’re tightly integrated but Miniflux supports several other integrations

      • Father_Redbeard@lemmy.mlEnglish
        7·
        14 days ago

        I’ve found the PWA adequate for my phone usage. I found a custom CSS that is sort of a Gruvbox that I really like.

    • Pixel@lemmy.caEnglish
      5·
      14 days ago

      I really liked Miniflux and its clean design too too, but I found without an adequate categorization functionality, it quickly became overwhelming. Since I don’t check my RSS reader as often as I should, it eventually got overwhelming and I had to switch to FreshRSS.

  • Emberleaf@lemmy.mlEnglish
    51·
    14 days ago

    I use the FeedBro add-on for Firefox. It’s highly configurable and works like a dream. I’ve not found anything better, honestly.

  • kinkles@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    31·
    14 days ago

    Use feeeed for iOS. Looks and feels more modern than a lot of the other RSS apps but without any stupid bs. Free with no ads. Has a built-in reader mode that strips out article ads. Developed by one very awesome dude.

    It can handle more than just RSS content too- you can follow Bluesky/Mastodon accounts, YouTube channel uploads, subreddits, and more with it.

    I highly recommend changing the default view from “cards” to “list” so you can see more content.

    • tkw8@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      14 days ago

      I couldn’t get this to work with FreshRSS. Do you know how to integrate it with the FreshRSS api?

      • kinkles@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        14 days ago

        I was able to import the demo feed successfully, but I’m not sure if it’ll work for every FreshRSS feed.

        • tkw8@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          14 days ago

          I appreciate your effort here & the screenshots. Unfortunately, this isn’t what I was looking for. This just imports a “dumb” feed and doesn’t actually integrate with the API. Integrating with FreshRSS’ API, (the app OP mentioned), allows the RSS reader to interoperate with the FreshRSS application. For example, if I read an article on my mobile device, it will be marked as read on FreshRSS. So if I later pull up my feed on Newsboat (on my linux machine) or Readrops (my android tablet), those same articles won’t be presented to me again. Also, if I’ve made any customizations regarding my home feed in FreshRSS those will also be reflected in these other RSS Readers. That’s why the API is the preferred way to connect to these other readers.

          I just didn’t see a place for a user/API key input within feeeed.

  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    62·
    14 days ago

    As an RSS user since the early days, there’s something I never get: why is this something that people are hosting? Are you really all consuming so much news, so much of the time, that you need to do it simultaneously on two devices? That sounds like news overload to me but what do I know.

    Personally, I catch up once a day for an hour (or two). Seem more than enough and means I only ever need an RSS client. Right now: the Feedbro add-on in Firefox desktop.

    As for tips and tools, RSSBox is a useful one. IMO if RSS were more popular this is the sort of thing that would be built into the client.

    • drkt@scribe.disroot.orgEnglish
      6·
      14 days ago

      The point of having the RSS reader somewhere not on my PC is that when I reinstall my PC it’s one less thing to configure again. I just open the browser bookmark and there it is exactly as I left it.

  • pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.devEnglish
    14·
    14 days ago

    FreshRSS has been amazing, as you said, other readers have other goals in mind and seems RSS is just an add-on.

    On Android’s also there are no good clients, I’ve been using the PWA which is good enough.
    There are several extensions for mobile menu improvements, I have Smart Mobile Menu, Mobile Scroll Menu and Touch Control (it works great on Firefox, but not on brave, it’s too sensitive there, so YMMV).

    There’s also ReadingTime, but there are feeds which don’t send the whole body of the post, so you might only see a 1minute read because of that.

    The extension AutoTTL processes the feeds and makes them update only when it’s more likely for them to get new items instead of every X minutes configured by FreshRSS.
    Still there’s a problem when the MaxTTL happens, all feeds are allowed to be updated and you might hit some rate limits, so I developed a rate limiter. Still there’s a problem with AutoTTL because how extensions are loaded and with the http code reported by FreshRSS.

    I found this project which receive the emails of newsletters and turns them into a RSS feed, I’ve only used it for one feed and I’ve only received one entry, not sure if the newsletter is that bad or if the site struggles to receive/show them. Haven’t tried something it.
    https://github.com/leafac/kill-the-newsletter

    There’s also this repo linking a lot of sites with feeds, and some sites which don’t offer feeds directly are provided via feedburner (which seems it’s a Google service and wikipedia says "primarily for monetizing RSS feeds, primarily by inserting targeted advertisements into them", so use those at your own discretion) https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds

  • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
    4·
    14 days ago

    Been happy with FreshRSS for years now (TTRSS before that). One thing that really improves it is RSS-Bridge which turns a lot of non RSS sites into feeds (and a lot of truncated feeds into full ones). It’s also a list of what hackerly types will put effort into getting a feed from, so self-curating in its way. Enjoy…

  • tkw8@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    14 days ago

    Mentioning Five Filters because no one has mentioned it yet. It will pull the full text of the articles and present them to you in your RSS reader (or FreshRSS) so you don’t have to navigate to a browser to read the article. Everything takes place in your native RSS app. I use it as a docker container. Actually, I create a stack with FreshRSS and Five Filters in the stack.

    Five Filters has a paid service, but they also have a free docker app for people who want to self-host. https://github.com/heussd/fivefilters-full-text-rss-docker

    I’m still searching for a good iOS reader app for FreshRSS.