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.

  • kayazere@feddit.nlEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    I’m using Feedly Classic on iOS. I would like to move off of it, but I have yet to find any other RSS client which presents the articles in a card like view which you can vertically swipe through to mark them as read.

    Feedly themselves abandoned this UI for an infinite scrolling list on their main app. All other RSS clients I tried have this similar UI, which I feel is really poor.

  • pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.devEnglish
    12·
    10 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

  • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    6·
    10 days ago

    I just use Nextcloud News since I am already using Nextcloud. It works well and installs in just a few clicks.

    For feeds I can only recommend to get rid of HN, its gives you a skewed perspective and is a huge waste of time. The only thing its good for is begging for support when Google deactivates your account.

  • ghost_towels@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    10 days ago

    I use Reeder classic for iOS. Plain and simple and easy to add feeds to. It works with my old reader account so that was a win for me.

    I want to set up hoarder once all my components arrive for the home server. Soon I hope!

    • robalees@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      23·
      10 days ago

      Sprung for Lire because $10 isn’t too bad (better than a subscription). But I need some convincing on why you like it? Still trying to figure out how I want to manage my feeds, using the All Articles isn’t working for me.

      • zelifcam@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        10 days ago

        It’s an RSS reader. Reviews are extremely positive. It collects no data. App has thoughtful configurations, adding subscriptions is smooth and I made it work for me.

  • tkw8@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    10 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.

  • peaceb@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    10 days ago

    I landed on lire for iOS after trying out a few apps, for my FreshRSS instance. It works and has spotlight indexing, which is nice.

    I’ve also been using News Explorer which relies on iCloud for sync. I like to have the separate app just to change up the feed notifications and News Explorer has a grid view that works for me on an iPad. I mostly use this for news sites, and I found the grid view to be the most pleasing for those kinds of articles.

  • PlaguedByReason@midwest.socialEnglish
    3·
    10 days ago

    Try the iOS app Unread: An RSS Reader. I use a self-hosted FreshRSS instance with API access enabled as the Unread app uses the Fever API (see link below). The Unread app typography is absolutely beautiful. I use the app without a subscription as it’s expensive but given how great it is, I’m considering subscribing to support continued development.

    https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_Fever_API.html

  • farcaller@fstab.shEnglish
    3·
    10 days ago

    I’ve been using FreshRSS and Reeder (now Reeder Classic) since google reader stopped being a thing. It’s pretty great.