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.

  • pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.devEnglish
    12·
    7 months 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

  • ghost_towels@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    7 months 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!

  • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    6·
    7 months 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.

  • tkw8@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    7 months 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.

  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    52·
    7 months 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·
      7 months 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.

  • farcaller@fstab.shEnglish
    3·
    7 months ago

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