I’m more interested in good RSS feeds than RSS readers. Of courseI’ve got all my news in there, but I’m looking to add interesting feeds but don’t know where to look.
The problem is finding a good local, desktop based RSS reader other than thunderbird or a damn server app, especially if you're on Windows.
Btw, what is a non-local RSS reader? I have come across multiple that RSS readers that advertise being "self-hosted" and I'm confused about that since in my mind RSS readers are simply clients that periodically query different servers for an .rss file, so I'm confused about where there is anything to host besides the host of the .rss feed.
The idea is to imitate the experience of something like Feedly, an RSS feed you can access from anywhere on any device, recommendations, all that... Which is overkill if all you want is just a simple program that queries for new posts every x hours.
It’s just a web based client instead of a desktop one. And it can usually output its own RSS feed that contains your other feeds so you can hook any RSS desktop client on any device to it.
Cross device synchronization, battery optimization for mobile devices, faster update speeds, etc.
It makes more sense to have a server downloading and consolidating the data from the various sources, rather than syncing and downloading from dozens or hundreds of sources to build the feed in real time.
It's technically possible to do it all client side, but it would put more load on the RSS sources, and be a much slower user experience.
What's wrong with Thunderbird? Surely you don't use Outlook by choice?
UI is too bloated, slow, resource hungry and I've had problems with displaying some feed content in the past.
Outlook
God forbid.
That's surprising. I found it be underpowered as an RSS reader, personally. Although I am really only using it for news - I know some people who use it for videos, etc.
I know some people who use it for videos, etc.
That's one of my problems with Thunderbid, anything that isn't a HTML page just has loads of problems with it. In fact, most of the readers recommended above by other people suffer from the same problems, it kind of sucks.
What's one that doesn't suck?
Good question.
I'm yet to find something that supports notifications, handles podcasts/videos and isn't janky as all hell or hasn't been abandoned for a decade by now.
I had been using Fluent Reader for months, suddenly the program wouldn't load up at all upon start. No visible GUI. Didn't back up my subscriptions so now I lost all my RSS links with it. :-/
Hopefully there's an update soon, or someone has a trick to retrieve my subscriptions, at least.
Thunderbird is fine, but I don't really want to interact with my feed how I interact with email.
I'm out of the loop since I've been using a self hosted Miniflux, but Raven certainly is an alternative.
It’s also been archived for a year with no revamp in sight.
Reeder on iOS and Mac is excellent. Not open source, but lovingly crafted by an indie dev.
I find the Feedbro plugin for Firefox quite handy.
It's what I've been using recently, but I really dislike how it's a browser extension, that and how it can't really handle audio files from my experience.
I've used Feedly for years and it makes keeping with various types of news so much easier.
Me too. I went Google reader to feedly and have been there since
I recently switched to a self hosted FreshRSS. I used Feedly for probably a decade tho.
I'd love that it had the feature that Feeder has to fetch incomplete RSS articles and put them in a nice view... Only because of that I have used Feeder more as of lately (still Feedly is my main RSS source).
When Reddit went to shit I turned to RSS to get my daily news. After trying many different iOS apps, all of which either sucked or had a monthly fee, I came across one called feeeed.
It has become one of my favorite apps and I highly recommend it. It’s free and extremely well designed! I believe its creator also works on the Arc browser team.
The lemmy community for my city is completely dead, so I follow the subreddit this way.
I'm using News Explorer. One-time purchase, and syncs your feeds and read/unread status between macOS and iOS/ipadOS.
Thank you for recommendation. Loving it already!
Also for iOS, News Explorer. It uses iCloud to sync between your devices, everything is on device, and it will even somehow do Reddit feeds! (Uh, I mean, if you still do that, maybe…). One time payment. Glorious.
Hey, thanks… this looks clean/feels really slick.
I definitely recommend turning on List view in the settings. The default card view is okay but it only lets you see 1-2 things at a time vs 5-6.
Did you know that, by default, your email sends information to mailing list platforms about your reading activity? The platform gets to know if you opened the message, and often how far along you've read in it.
What is this shitty email program they're talking about? Sure, they can embed a 1-pixel tracking image to see when you opened the email (if you allow auto-loading images), but how would they know how much you've read unless some incredibly horrible email program actively sends out that data?
Most made by large corps. For example, Apple got in some hot water not too long ago for changing the way they track in Apple Mail.
Servers track sent, delivered, bounced, and blocked.
Clients phone home with opened, read, CTR, and junk status.
Just... wow. I don't even enable notifications that I've opened an email.
Yeah I've never heard of that either, and I've used email marketing platforms. They have a lot of analytics, but nothing anywhere near that level. (Granted, this was also back in like 2010.)
Hasn't RSS support been dropping these last few years? Last I heard was that RSS was dying, though I don't know how true that is.
Probably not technically true because podcasts use RSS
But a few make it very hard to find the .rss link... as do platforms like Spotify or Apple.
The author of this excellent article mentioned that we and by extension, our friends, all hate being on TwiXter etc. but cant figure out a day to leave or place to go. While I believe the 'place' should be figured out amongst yourselves and there are many excellent options getting better by the day, I will do the hard thing and choose a time to make it easier for you/us....
December 28th, 2024
Please be sure to have you destination decided ahead of time. Just like voting, I suggest you do it early and feel free to be a part of the advance team that straddles between the new location while still using the former ahead of the 28th.
I believe in you and know you can do it. Tell your friends. ...and you're welcome :)
edit: RSS is a great tool that will make the move easier
I never stopped. I went from feeds in Netscape Navigator to Google Reader to Feedly and now I self-host Miniflux.
Similar here, Google Reader -> Feedly -> selfhosted TT-RSS -> selfhosted FreshRSS
I need an android rss reader that ACTUALLY caches the articles. I use feeder and most of the time it just fetches the titles, I've been through every setting. "fetch full articles by default" is on for all of my feeds.
I kinda gave up on rss awhile ago when it seemed like feed availability was dropping and Google dropped support. Disagree with author that the reader doesn't matter. It can really shape your experience. Appreciate good recommendation for something that doesn't cost $2 a month.
For android, I use Feeder, but I've also enjoyed Cappy, Neo Feed, Twine, and Nunti. Nunti is a really interesting one that uses a local, private smart algorithm to show you more of what interests you.
Any good readers for IOS that don’t require a subscription (preferably FOSS)?
Twine is a great simple RSS reader and it is open source.
I am currently using NewsBlur because I like how it syncs across devices and its tagging system. It is also open source, but it is not the prettiest and the UX takes some getting used to.
I use the Feedbro extension right in my browser.
i think youtube still supports rss feeds
i think some channels can turn it off but most don't.
Is that buried in the UI behind paywall and requiring an account?
nope, it's just the channel url. works with most rss readers.
watching the actual video isnt available, it's just a chronological feed.
I’m more interested in good RSS feeds than RSS readers. Of courseI’ve got all my news in there, but I’m looking to add interesting feeds but don’t know where to look.
For websites that don't have an RSS feed, check out RSS-bridge! https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
It generates web feeds for websites that don't have one.
A no-install, no-config option I built for this purpose: https://rss.diffbot.com
Interesting, ill try this
The problem is finding a good local, desktop based RSS reader other than thunderbird or a damn server app, especially if you're on Windows.
Btw, what is a non-local RSS reader? I have come across multiple that RSS readers that advertise being "self-hosted" and I'm confused about that since in my mind RSS readers are simply clients that periodically query different servers for an .rss file, so I'm confused about where there is anything to host besides the host of the .rss feed.
The idea is to imitate the experience of something like Feedly, an RSS feed you can access from anywhere on any device, recommendations, all that... Which is overkill if all you want is just a simple program that queries for new posts every x hours.
It’s just a web based client instead of a desktop one. And it can usually output its own RSS feed that contains your other feeds so you can hook any RSS desktop client on any device to it.
Cross device synchronization, battery optimization for mobile devices, faster update speeds, etc.
It makes more sense to have a server downloading and consolidating the data from the various sources, rather than syncing and downloading from dozens or hundreds of sources to build the feed in real time.
It's technically possible to do it all client side, but it would put more load on the RSS sources, and be a much slower user experience.
What's wrong with Thunderbird? Surely you don't use Outlook by choice?
UI is too bloated, slow, resource hungry and I've had problems with displaying some feed content in the past.
God forbid.
That's surprising. I found it be underpowered as an RSS reader, personally. Although I am really only using it for news - I know some people who use it for videos, etc.
That's one of my problems with Thunderbid, anything that isn't a HTML page just has loads of problems with it. In fact, most of the readers recommended above by other people suffer from the same problems, it kind of sucks.
What's one that doesn't suck?
Good question.
I'm yet to find something that supports notifications, handles podcasts/videos and isn't janky as all hell or hasn't been abandoned for a decade by now.
https://hyliu.me/fluent-reader/
https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard
I had been using Fluent Reader for months, suddenly the program wouldn't load up at all upon start. No visible GUI. Didn't back up my subscriptions so now I lost all my RSS links with it. :-/ Hopefully there's an update soon, or someone has a trick to retrieve my subscriptions, at least.
Feedly, Fluent Reader, NewsBlur, yarr, etc.
Thunderbird is fine, but I don't really want to interact with my feed how I interact with email.
I'm out of the loop since I've been using a self hosted Miniflux, but Raven certainly is an alternative.
It’s also been archived for a year with no revamp in sight.
Reeder on iOS and Mac is excellent. Not open source, but lovingly crafted by an indie dev.
I find the Feedbro plugin for Firefox quite handy.
It's what I've been using recently, but I really dislike how it's a browser extension, that and how it can't really handle audio files from my experience.
I've used Feedly for years and it makes keeping with various types of news so much easier.
Me too. I went Google reader to feedly and have been there since
I recently switched to a self hosted FreshRSS. I used Feedly for probably a decade tho.
I'd love that it had the feature that Feeder has to fetch incomplete RSS articles and put them in a nice view... Only because of that I have used Feeder more as of lately (still Feedly is my main RSS source).
When Reddit went to shit I turned to RSS to get my daily news. After trying many different iOS apps, all of which either sucked or had a monthly fee, I came across one called feeeed.
It has become one of my favorite apps and I highly recommend it. It’s free and extremely well designed! I believe its creator also works on the Arc browser team.
NetNewsWire works great for me.
old.reddit still has RSS feeds for subreddits, if there's anything you still want to follow there. e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/technology.rss
The lemmy community for my city is completely dead, so I follow the subreddit this way.
I'm using News Explorer. One-time purchase, and syncs your feeds and read/unread status between macOS and iOS/ipadOS.
Thank you for recommendation. Loving it already!
Also for iOS, News Explorer. It uses iCloud to sync between your devices, everything is on device, and it will even somehow do Reddit feeds! (Uh, I mean, if you still do that, maybe…). One time payment. Glorious.
Hey, thanks… this looks clean/feels really slick.
I definitely recommend turning on List view in the settings. The default card view is okay but it only lets you see 1-2 things at a time vs 5-6.
What is this shitty email program they're talking about? Sure, they can embed a 1-pixel tracking image to see when you opened the email (if you allow auto-loading images), but how would they know how much you've read unless some incredibly horrible email program actively sends out that data?
Most made by large corps. For example, Apple got in some hot water not too long ago for changing the way they track in Apple Mail.
Servers track sent, delivered, bounced, and blocked.
Clients phone home with opened, read, CTR, and junk status.
Just... wow. I don't even enable notifications that I've opened an email.
Yeah I've never heard of that either, and I've used email marketing platforms. They have a lot of analytics, but nothing anywhere near that level. (Granted, this was also back in like 2010.)
Hasn't RSS support been dropping these last few years? Last I heard was that RSS was dying, though I don't know how true that is.
Probably not technically true because podcasts use RSS
But a few make it very hard to find the .rss link... as do platforms like Spotify or Apple.
The author of this excellent article mentioned that we and by extension, our friends, all hate being on TwiXter etc. but cant figure out a day to leave or place to go. While I believe the 'place' should be figured out amongst yourselves and there are many excellent options getting better by the day, I will do the hard thing and choose a time to make it easier for you/us....
December 28th, 2024
Please be sure to have you destination decided ahead of time. Just like voting, I suggest you do it early and feel free to be a part of the advance team that straddles between the new location while still using the former ahead of the 28th.
I believe in you and know you can do it. Tell your friends. ...and you're welcome :)
edit: RSS is a great tool that will make the move easier
I never stopped. I went from feeds in Netscape Navigator to Google Reader to Feedly and now I self-host Miniflux.
Similar here, Google Reader -> Feedly -> selfhosted TT-RSS -> selfhosted FreshRSS
I need an android rss reader that ACTUALLY caches the articles. I use feeder and most of the time it just fetches the titles, I've been through every setting. "fetch full articles by default" is on for all of my feeds.
☞ https://f-droid.org/packages/ru.yanus171.feedexfork/ or https://github.com/yanus171/Handy-News-Reader
Not sure why you were down voted, thanks for the recommendations!
Much of the time, the sites only put a small blurb and a link to the actual article in the feed, so you still have to click through to read it all.
Kind of not what you're looking for, but use rss2email to send everything as a mail to a mail address.
https://newsboat.org/
Love me some RSS.
I kinda gave up on rss awhile ago when it seemed like feed availability was dropping and Google dropped support. Disagree with author that the reader doesn't matter. It can really shape your experience. Appreciate good recommendation for something that doesn't cost $2 a month.
https://stackdiary.com/free-rss-readers/
This was pretty useful to me.
For android, I use Feeder, but I've also enjoyed Cappy, Neo Feed, Twine, and Nunti. Nunti is a really interesting one that uses a local, private smart algorithm to show you more of what interests you.
Any good readers for IOS that don’t require a subscription (preferably FOSS)?
Twine is a great simple RSS reader and it is open source.
I am currently using NewsBlur because I like how it syncs across devices and its tagging system. It is also open source, but it is not the prettiest and the UX takes some getting used to.
I use the Feedbro extension right in my browser.
i think youtube still supports rss feeds
i think some channels can turn it off but most don't.
Is that buried in the UI behind paywall and requiring an account?
nope, it's just the channel url. works with most rss readers.
watching the actual video isnt available, it's just a chronological feed.
OMFG that's actually pretty cool!
yes daddy 🥺