I've been using this ever since Google Reader went to the cemetery.
Thinking about it now, I think it's absolute best feature is that it is stable. There's not this constant flow of bullshit "new feature! redesign! experience the new and enhanced look and totally fucked up interface of our new version!" that you get from most other bullshit companies. I love that. It's a great tool, because it's reliable.
Only enhancement I can think of would be some ad-filtering, as a few of my feeds have metastasized "Sponsored" content that must be filtered out before polluting my brain.
I tried it out when moving off of feedly when they had a bug that effectively locked me out.
I used a google address for my
Account but don’t sign in via google. Feedly noticed my account was a google account and kept trying to redirect me to googles login. Support wasn’t helpful, and only responded when I posted a workaround on Reddit/twitter.
Anyway at that point I started looking for alternatives. And ultimately landed on the older reader and miniflux. Frankly I am still on miniflux.
The limitation with all these systems is the lack of filters (where I can group all messages that match a filter into a folder). It's common to support grouping feeds into folders, but I want to have a folder of covid-related articles, and one of australian climate policy etc. Feeds are often a jumble of messages on different topics (which is quite reasonable).
Feedwrangler had a very primitive version of this but anyway it's end-of-lifed.*
NetNewsWire used to have excellent filtering but it's been rewritten without them. I use ReadKit on the mac because it does have pretty good filtering. Its own rewrite doesn't have that feature yet, and sharing the filters between platforms will be a future feature. But at the moment, as far as I can tell, it's my only option.
* The developer gave everyone a year's notice and arranged a transfer mechanism to another feed service. Pretty responsible!
This is one of the reasons why I find it most convenient to use an RSS feed to email project instead of an online reader.
Since the messages are "just email" you can filter, tag, and process them with .forward/.procmailrc, or your google filters.
I put together a CLI of my own to do the fetching, but there are a whole bunch of them out there and to be honest you probably don't need much complexity - beyond a couple of simple filters, and include/exclude regular expressions.
Really interesting. I’ve been slowly spending pandemic years moving as much out of email as possible.
I did realize a year ago I should still have things in email and forward them from there. So for newsletters and general marketing emails, I have them come to two of my emails before forwarding them to https://stoopinbox.com. I see feed readers are beginning to accept better newsletter and email features.
I also like YouTube to be in a central feed reader too. Mostly to stop myself from spending more time on it than I’d like to. And YouTube’s playlist organization is a pain for me. There’s no way to search between your own playlists on mobile. So my obsessive organizing ends up having lots of duplicate playlists.
I haven’t looked much into feed readers. I got Inoreader’s paid tier. The second paid tier when it was on sale. It has filtering. No idea how good it is.
I also mostly care about filtering as well. Patterns and categorizing things is a love for me. I need to spend a bit of spare time on figuring it all out. Especially before Inoreader renewal comes up.
I haven’t yet figured out which mobile or desktop app to use for feed reading though. Do I use Inoreader directly or something that syncs with it. Not sure if the filtering works if syncing.
Regardless, do you have any opinion on any mobile feed readers? Are you using the old Readkit on desktop still?
I’ve been using the old reader for a few years now. The cost for my premium subscription is: “$25 per year - Up to 500 feeds” (quoted from my latest invoice).
It works really well, the interface is simple and unadorned, with an emphasis on the targeted content rather than a flashy frontend.
I don’t think I ever remember the service being down or unavailable all the time I’ve ever used it.
Thanks for the info. I’m suspicious of every service which is not upfront about pricing. I couldn’t find anything on the linked website regarding what to expect to eventually pay.
Instead, a large “sign up” button. Which, from experience, usually means that a company is interested in gathering user data beyond providing the advertised service.
Tempted to give this a try instead of feedly, but I can't find anywhere that they say (a) how much premium costs, or (b) what the restrictions on the free plan are. All I can see is on the Sign Up page, there's a drop-down that says what you get if you try premium for 14 days - no mention of how much it costs after that, or what the limitations are without it.
I don't mind paying (I currently pay for feedly), but I'd like to know what I'm up for before signing up.
I'll put in a plug for BazQux Reader ( https://bazqux.com/ ). I switched to it shortly after Google Reader was killed, and I've used it daily since then.
It's simple, the UI is clean, and it _just works_. Totally worth the subscription.
I use FreshRSS on the server side, Reeder on mobile (iOS), Newsboat on desktop. Reeder + FreshRSS has been a very premium-feeling experience for me. One downside to this setup is that FreshRSS' web interface sucks on mobile, at least on iOS -- but with Reeder I never have to use the web interface.
There is an Android RSS client I've used that works with FreshRSS but I can't recall it.
I self host the following services to get RSS feeds for specific users/channels on closed (or less functional with RSS) platforms:
- Bibliogram (Instagram)
- Nitter (Twitter)
- Teddit (Reddit)
- RSSHub (Youtube and a bunch of other integrations)
Like having an article go into a smart folder based on a keyword or some other basic filtering metric (say the author, tags of the blog post etc). Really anything beyond the basic way feed readers have folders and feeds by site
What didn't you like about miniflux? I've been using that for a couple of years now, solid, easy web interface (or use Fever feeds for a client), and paired with rss-bridge works great.
It's been a few years, so I can't say for sure. I think there were some deployment and web UI issues, but I see now v2 is written in Go, so I might give it a try again. Thanks.
For reference, I run miniflux on a Pi (4? I think) which is my home server. Runs great on there and I mostly just use the web reader these days. Was a little more minimalist than I would have liked at first, but grown to appreciate that. Nice and fast too.
Fraidycat looks good, though it's more like a client than a self-hosted service. I especially like that it can follow / aggregate a bunch of different types of sources. https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat
Not your question, but I tried a bunch after Google Reader shut down and landed on Bazqux. I've been a happy paying customer for years since the dev was so responsive and even helped identify an issue with one of my self-created feeds...
Not exactly what you’re after but IF you’re on Mac/iOS you can set up Reeder (https://reederapp.com/) in combination with iCloud to sync across devices.
Or if you don’t care about having multiple devices synced you can simply use the app and have your local feed.
I am not sure how each of the apps are between one another. For pricing, I think Reeder is one time while Fiery Feed Reader is $15 a year for in app family subscription. Readkit is $10 a year or $40 lifetime.
All three apps are made by indie developers and not bigger corporations.
I use the official extension from Nextcloud. It has an user interface in the nextcloud web app and a dedicated mobile client.
Probably not as fully featured as other services, but it perfectly fits my needs and if you already has a Nextcloud instance, it's just one click away from install.
I've been using selfoss since Google Reader shut down. It's nothing special, but it's been running without problems for many years now without any issues
Old Reader has the best balance I’ve seen for something that’s free and maintains performance. I probably haven’t used RSS regularly enough, but I could easily live with 50 feeds to follow.
The main issue I find with the RSS readers is that it doesn't cover commenting (maybe that is by design, I'm not sure). So if I have to login to a separate page/app for commenting, then might as well directly read over there. Though I don't have a lot of separate sources for my articles so maybe my concern isn't "mainstream".
Yeah, if that’s just as easy, I don’t think they are for you. I have roughly 80 blogs and websites I get updates from, visiting them all the time to check for updates manually would be horrible.
Thinking about it now, I think it's absolute best feature is that it is stable. There's not this constant flow of bullshit "new feature! redesign! experience the new and enhanced look and totally fucked up interface of our new version!" that you get from most other bullshit companies. I love that. It's a great tool, because it's reliable.
Only enhancement I can think of would be some ad-filtering, as a few of my feeds have metastasized "Sponsored" content that must be filtered out before polluting my brain.