I see a lot of options for self-hosting RSS subscriptions and I don’t actually understand what they are for. The very nature of RSS is that it tracks and connects to online content. It seems like having a home server track and download the content just so that you can download it on another device from your server instead of the original servers a bit redundant. Also, it seems like the clients are more limited, since it has ro connect to your personal host, as opposed to the many RSS readers available.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I genuinely don’t get it. What am I missing?
Because there’s no native sync for feeds between NetNewsWire and FreshRSS. iOS and Windows developers don’t develop useful apps for both platforms for free.
I self-host RSSHub so my reader can pull feeds for websites that don’t provide them. I don’t host my reader, though.
Pretty much what others said, I host Fresh RSS.
Most company-owned services are 1) Tracking your behavior 2) Going to upsell you (freemium, etc.) You think Feedly is ‘free’ - not really, they are collecting your info and have a team of marketers trying to figure out how to get $$ out of you, and will slowly gate features behind the paywall.
MinifluxRSS with Nextflux frontend (browser) and Caddy for Android. You can now write .py/etc. scripts to capture your starred items to Obsidian (or favorite PKB), run AI on those to summarize, tag, and organize. I find it easier and it will never ‘shut down’ or change model.
I usually read my RSS feeds on my phone. That’s fine - I could do this by just subscribing to the sources directly. But every once in a while I want to look up something I read some years ago and I don’t quite remember what the article was called and where it was published. Filtering and searching on my desktop is much more convenient and I have my history saved there - even if the blog in question is offline in the meantime. In addition some RSS feeds only send a short text and a “read more” link. With FreshRSS I can configure a feed to automatically load the complete article from the website and in my reader it shows up as if the feed was a real full feed with pictures and everything. I can even compress the pictures to optimize loading as my main reader is my phone.
For me the main point is, syncronization. Point is I want to read on my phone, or if i go to another computer catch up on it. If I set up a seperate RSS reader on each, then I’d have to figure out what’s read and what’s not. Honestly that’s a feature that google reader really had me spoiled in, I loved being able to use a work computer, browse through my rss feeds, star articles that I thought I may want to come back to, go home look at the starred ones and then go back.
Then google reader shut down, and I wanted to be able to do the same again, while also not being vulnerable to another shut down.
Same for me: I read on both laptop and phone so sync is important
Then google reader shut down, and I wanted to be able to do the same again, while also not being vulnerable to another shut down
still using Feedly since the Reader shutdown and it’s still going strong
one Location for dozen of rss feeds instead of looking up each individual. alternative is of course setting up the feeds on the client computer, but that works only nice if you use it only from one device (e.g. read history sync).
furthermore i prefer to have such set ups on a server with backups, so if e.g. my phone gets lost i don’t need to find back all those urls.
IMO, I think my answer here is really the same for all of my self-hosted apps: I want to control the flow of the data myself and not be upset when an app we use every day is retired or changed or just enshittifies over time. And this way, I know nobody is in between me and the news publisher. They can see what I read but nobody else is watching over that process in the middle.
I was a loyal Inoreader fan for many years before switching to FreshRSS on my server and I won’t go back. That’s a great service but self hosting any app is just better.
I host Tiny Tiny RSS.
- my list of subscriptions and categorisations are centralised so I don’t have to set this up on any other device. I can access this on my phone, tablet and PC.
- it synchronises read/unread stories across devices so I don’t have to keep sifting through the same articles I’ve seen.
- I’ve got a long list of blacklisted words. I don’t want to hear about sports news, celebrity gossip, USA-centric news, “he said/she said” bullshit from social media that mainstream news seems to love to report, etc. Now I can set up my blacklist in one place centrally.
- there are a lot of great apps that will access the server RSS feed. I’m never actually going to to TTRSS browser page.
The point isn’t to download content to the server at all. It’s to keep the centralised list. I host opodsync (Gpodder podcast server) for the same reason.
I thought tt-rss stopped development. Or doing out use a fork?
Because you don’t want your phone connecting to 200 servers every hour. And to sync across devices.
Exactly this.
Oh I can actually answer something, neat.
I thought I was missing the appeal too, but when I got back into tabletop roleplaying games, a lot of the community is located over on Substack blogs, and I don’t like Substack. My solution was to start running FreshRSS and put all of the feeds into it so I could read at my own pace, and also not have to go to a million sites to keep track of content. Saves me a lot of tabs in an internet browser, if nothing else.
Sadly, not all sites or blogs have RSS feeds to hand out, but I’ve used https://openrss.org/ to get around that for the most part if they don’t.
which blogs do you follow over on substack? ive never had the issue of feeling like a lot of ttrpg people are there, most people i follow are most active on their own sites (eg troypress, jeremy strandberg) or, tragically, on discord.
Telemetry is one reason.
Not having to worry about the service shutting down (Google Reader) is another.
Synced read status is a common one as well.
You may also use it in combination with another service to create RSS feeds for sites that dont have one.
Honestly having it not just get killed like Google Reader is a big chunk of the userbase.
I was devastated when Google Reader shut down. I switched to another service after that and it shut down not long after that. Maybe a year or so.
I would have paid for that service at the time.
I can access my RSS feeds on multiple devices without losing track of what I’ve already read.
Pardon my ignorance but isn’t that exactly what Inoreader and Feedly do?
Google reader used to to it too. Then it died.
I won’t get hurt like thst again.
Yes because they have a server
Yes, I tried both before going self hosted; and both try very hard to make your life difficult if you don’t subscribe. Actually I got hooked on RSS with Google Reader, which was a perfect, simple, free reader. It got shut down, because I guess it doesn’t make sense to provide that service for free.
Pretty much, but I keep getting burned by “free” and sometimes non-free online services. It’s a large part of why I self host the things I do.
And alot of folks are still bitter about Google Reader being shut down.
I have more control over it and I don’t need to create accounts and give out my email address.
I integrate Miniflux with readeck, which is then combined with a readeck plugin for koreader, allowing me to easily read articles on my ereader, without relying on a paid service.
I’m also one of those people that still uses custom ROMs on Android, and since the backup and restore situation is still kind of dire if you don’t use Google (and sometimes even with) it’s easier to have most of my configuration and state stored on a server, and so I can wipe a phone with relatively little risk.
I use Wallabag in a similar way.
