Ask HN: Which RSS reader do you use?
Its been some time since this question was asked. Every RSS reader I've used so far sucks. Either the built-in web support is poor or it stops fetching the feeds or renders then poorly. Sorry for my frustration, but I would like to know what everyone else is using and if they are satisfied with their RSS reader. I have been using RSS since early 2000s and currently I am settled on Feedly. > Either the built-in web support is poor or it stops fetching the feeds or renders then poorly. I guess I am good with Feedly, and Google Reader and everything before that, is because I dont use the RSS Reader to read the content. I am only using RSS as News Headline [1]. And then will either Command Click, Right Click Open New Tab, Simply Click on it, depending on which OS and browser I am using to open them in a new Tab inside Browser. Which is also the reason why I could end up with hundreds of tabs open. And I read them one by one. For these type of heavy browsing usage I recommend Firefox > Chrome > Safari. So for my usage I actually think RSS should be a function inside a browser. But I know a lot of people use RSS reader differently. [1] Which is also how I use Twitter as well. I simply have a list of people I follow and read those list only. So for me I dont ever understand why people are so upset with the For You Tab. But I guess I am the minority and I use it differently. i used to use feedly, as they were first out the gate after google reader shut down (word on the street was they had a headsup), but they jacked the pricing and introduced a bunch of needless extra features that i couldn’t turn off, so now i use inoreader. theoldreader is also good >but they jacked the pricing and introduced a bunch of needless extra features that i couldn’t turn off, I dont use anything other than the basic and I use it for free. Just curious What features are you looking for? Reading this thread it seems everyone uses RSS so differently I wish we could start another HN thread on this topic. another vote for inoreader, closest to the no BS approach as with google reader, just headlines, small summaries, nothing more needed; NetNewsWire - https://netnewswire.com I use it with my iCloud and it's synced on my Mac & iPhone. It just works! Inoreader FTW!!! Generous free tier and no nonsense UX. Can't say enough good things about it. I just checked them up and 150 RSS feeds on free account isn't enough for my usage. If they have been around for this long and the limit was the same over the years it is likely the reason why I passed them when switching from Google Reader. I've been using inoreader since.... (checks email)... 2015! Good service, mobile app is decent and I haven't had to worry about switching or anything and its almost been a decade. They upped their prices out of the realm of worthwhileness. Self-hosted Miniflux, and ReadKit on my Apple devices to access it. https://miniflux.app
https://readkit.app I've used Miniflux for a long time, and its content manipulation features allows you to work around some of the oddities of RSS feeds you come across. I love that I can pull whole articles. I wrote https://markdown.download for llm use, but mostly ended up using it with miniflux to fetch full articles from problematic sites Could you please share your Miniflux configuration for fetching full articles? There is an option in feed settings: [x] Fetch original content But most power comes from URL rewrite rules. Here is the one I use for problematic sites: rewrite("^(.+)$"|"https://markdown.download/$1") How do you have your manipulation configured on a particular website? I have been using Newsblur[1] since Google Reader turned up it's toes. I have been very happy with it. Nice and stable. I use it lots through both the browser and its Android phone app (has an Iphone app, too) and both have been great. Another very happy Newsblur user here, again since the demise of Google Reader. No complaints at all, it does one job and it does it impeccably. Newsboat for reading in terminal / TUI. I've used it for years and it's quite capable for my needs. Reeder on iOS / macOS:
https://reederapp.com/classic/ With Inoreader as backend: https://www.inoreader.com/ Another vote for Reeder. Very nice app and note that you can use iCloud as the backend and don’t need a separate service. True, but I want to use RSS on non-Apple devices as well. So I was looking for something with a web interface. That’s also why I’m still using the classic version I also really like Reeder but use miniflux as the backend This is what I use as well. It's not perfect but it's the best I've tried so far. I've been using Inoreader for a few years now and I'm pretty happy with it. Its reliability and feature set is the right balance for me. I've written about its pros and cons [1], the main pros for me are: - Very smooth experience between web, android, and iOS apps (I’m mentioning this first, as many other apps I’ve tried are flaky) - Mark as read while scrolling (Very useful for quickly shortlisting items from the feed. This is probably the main reason I’ve been able to replace Inoreader with social media apps.) - Rules to auto-delete duplicated items or if the title contains specific words. [1] https://saeedesmaili.com/posts/my-content-consumption-workfl... After Google Reader was shut down, I found TTRSS and use it since then.
It works and there are some great extensions like FeedIron available to process RSS feeds before the will integrated into the UI I really like Mailbrew. Daily email digests from RSS feeds (and a bunch of other stuff). Brief in Firefox (on my Mac laptop). Also Feeder on Android: https://github.com/spacecowboy/Feeder I was dissatisfied with the available RSS readers, so I wrote my own called Follow https://follow.is . It addresses several key issues I faced: - Optimized display for images, videos, audio, and notifications - Specialized optimization for RSSHub, allowing subscriptions to thousands of websites that don't offer RSS, such as X, Instagram, and Telegram - AI-powered translation, summaries, and a daily important news summary Are you the maintainer of it? Amazing :) switched to it few months ago I self-host it It's the best option if you use multiple devices and have the ability to self-host IMO. i used to think this until i tried commafeed. the webapp is so nice i never bother with a client Looks interesting, this didn't turn up in my search when I was looking. Thanks for sharing. But being PHP means there is a lot of moving parts. Miniflux is a lot easier to maintain… Not a lot to worry with the Docker container. Even without a container it's pretty easy to run PHP with a HTTP server like Caddy, there's no need for any extra configuration aside from passing the required directives in the server config for your setup. You can find many examples in the docs. Yeah it's why containers are beautiful. Zero hassle to replicate. You can use any cheap webhosting Same here. I self-host it since 3 years and didn't feel the need to change it. A stable application which doesn't have any problems which OP mentioned.
I use it as a PWA on mobile. I moved to this when InoReader started charging 60 bucks per year. Never looked back. Same Here. The web use is non-intrusive and works well on both desktop and mobile. Same here. Plus FeedMe as a client on Android. Feedbin as a backend and Reeder Classic on Mac and iOS for Reading. I'm pretty satisfied with that setup. One does not really need a backend, but I have far too many feeds, plus Feedbin has a email feature which transforms newsletters into feeds. Also nice: Since this year there is a feature for broken feeds: Feedbin does some URL spelunking as to find a different URL on the same domain. I use Reeder Classic instead of last years "New Reeder" because they have different paradigms: Classic has the bookmark folder with numbers structure, whereas the new Reeder has timeline/River of News paradigm without read/unread bits. That works for social media, but not for my case of subscribing to blogs which publish seldom. The author has promised to keep Reeder Classic current for the time being. Fingers crossed. If Reeder Classic goes dead I either look into Unread or NetNewswire. The latter would be a homecoming – NNW was my first Feedreader back in 2003 or so. If Feedbin goes dead, I'd look maybe into a self-hosted backend or go backend-less. I've used RSS since Google Reader, then Feedly, then Flipboard. I eventually got more concerned about privacy and moved to self-hosting. I tried a few tools, built some, and ended up with NextCloud's News app, but when I built my own alternative to NextCloud [1], I made sure to build a "better version" of what I wanted from an RSS reader. If the feed has a short summary, it fetches the whole article and strips out all HTML, and if I want to read more, I can jump to the website/article, otherwise it's usually good enough for me. I also try to never follow more than 10 feeds (right now I'm at 12 because a couple only publish 2-3x year). I only have a few really interesting things to read every day. FOMO was real when I started doing this years ago with NextCloud, but I learned to deal with that. I love this setup. I use the Feedbro [1] extension in the browser and the Flym [2] app on Android. I'm quite satisfied with both. Shucks, Flym is archived. This seems to be the pattern on mobile: the good apps die young. I’m selfhosting both miniflux (after being a paying customer for a while) and freshrss. Main reason for adding freshrss was to test the flaresolverr plugin. I haven’t been able to get it to work, but I kept using freshrss. If you’re interested in how well-behaved your client is, you can read Rachel’s posts. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/ I use feed2mail, which is a Python program that turns RSS Feeds into Maildir emails. I have my own patchset on top to address some issues. Back in the day I used r2e, which was an old python scrip for the same purpose. I actually removed it primarily because it was the last package on my system at the time to need python, and removing it let me purge a whole bunch of python packages and save a lot of space! These days I still read feeds via RSS, via a static golang binary. It lets me do filtering, and similar things: Feedly. It's fine. Yup. Site is fine, Android app is fine, it works reliably. Been paying for it happily since Google Reader went away. I've used almost all of the ones listed including rolling my own RSS to ePub script. I've been using Readwise Reader lately which has been a great blend of vimish keys, read it later, tagging, and AI summaries. For me it's Thunderbird, "Blogs & News Feeds" section. After version 120-something it stopped resizing images on article load - this is the part I find unsatisfying. Otherwise it just works. I self host tiny tiny rss (tt-rss) in my home lab and access it using Firefox. Then I read articles with the Firefox reader view. Being visually impaired I like the larger text available. "Feeder" on Android. Built-in web is the Android web client. But I let it open the links with Firefox anyway. I just use the RSS Reader to get the list, actual reading I do in the Browser. I used to host Miniflux using my leftover Heroku student credits. But about 1 month ago I started to respect the work that writers put into their website design, so I have no use for the inbuilt reader anymore. Made the switch to https://scour.ing/, it's a feed crawler in my opinion, pretty much under development but good enough for my simple use case. I'm still running a self-hosted Fever instance, it still didn't break down with newer PHP versions. Using Reeder Classic as an RSS client. Also something threatened by unwanted updates. I've been using email since the Google Reader shutdown. The short versions is that I filter (almost all) feeds into a few folders that have no notifications. Now I have a offline-first reader that is already synced to all of my devices. The long form: https://kevincox.ca/2013/06/27/email-as-rss-reader/ I’ve been using Feedbin since Google Reader shut down. Been very happy with it. I access it through the web on desktop and using Reeder 4 on iOS; both work well. Exactly the same. Haven't bothered with Reeder 5. I use my own RSS reader [0] Recently I also extracted web reading into a separate library which should make writing new projects like RSS readers easier [1] The Old Reader (https://theoldreader.com) in the browser. The Old Reader in browser and as backend for FeedMe on phone. Newsraft, before I was using Newsboat. https://codeberg.org/newsraft/newsraft Here is a video to see how it works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE-PhXnvp30 Miniflux (miniflux.app) I used to use FreshRSS, but there were some minor pain points that eventually pushed me to find an alternative. Miniflux has been great so far. It's very minimalistic, which also makes it very lightweight to self-host, as I do, but you can also subscribe to the hosted version for about a dollar a month. Self-hosted FreshRSS, NetNewsWire on Mac, Fluent reader on linux/windows/ios. Any reader compatible with Google Reader API works with FreshRSS, and Fluent was the nicest UI I've seen (hasn't been updated recently, but I don't need new features). Sadly, I'm another one on thunderbird email client. It's not great, but it generally works. My major complaint is that articles are not locally stored, so if the online article goes away, its just gone. I found this ironic, given that as an email client, a major function is local storage of messages. NewsBlur Newsblur has been stable and consistent since the Google Reader shutdown. Has plenty of goodies. Samuel Clay, the creator, is responsive to feedback. Can't fault it. The best $36 I pay every year. Big RSS user. Loved Google Reader till it shut down, then switched to Feedly which I liked well enough, but it keeps cramming in business features I don’t need. Switched to Inoreader last year and have loved it. Writing this comment in its web view right now. If you are this picky, then write your own. That's what I did: You are welcome to use but don't complain the lack of functionality. I wrote it to suit my own need. Nextcloud News, still using v24.0 - which is no longer supported but for which I made a patch to make it work in current Nextcloud versions - instead of the current v25.0 rewrite since the former is functionally superior over the latter for my use case. Anyone looking to mix up their own RSS feeds? I've recently launched Mashups It's the good ole Yahoo Pipes clone! Would love for those who want to mix RSS feeds to try it out! If I’m on iOS I regularly use “feeeed”: https://feeeed.nateparrott.com/ It has some extra functionality for certain websites like HackerNews so it shows points, etc. I self host freshrss (https://www.freshrss.org/), super easy to set up via docker and it doesn't required some over provisioned dependency setup (DB servers, etc...). It has nice/familiar keyboard shortcuts and a clean and fast interface. My only complaint is that the cloudflare-ifiation (aka enshittification) that is slowly ruining and rotting the internet prevents the fetching of RSS feeds from some news sites from your presumably affordable non hyperscaler VPS instance. When using mobile I use https://capyreader.com/ which has first class intigration with freshrss; meaning you can add/remove/view feeds via the app and have the changes sync with freshrss. Also, probably my favorite feature of capy reader, is that when you want to view the content of an rss article that is only a summary or headline (because few people publish the full content of their articles in the rss feed anymore), you can just press a button and it will fetch it for you and display it in the reader without sending you to a browser. So much happier and more accurately informed since moving back to RSS where I can choose what I want to see vs having it filtered/fed to me via some biased algorithm. Freshrss is a great choice I think. I use the freshrss web interface on my phone, that works quite well I feel. The app might not be necessary. BTW, Freshrss also has a function to fetch the full article content directly. I think it's not especially clever, just uses a selector, but worked well for me for the one or two feeds where I enabled it. Oh nice! I didn't know that FreshRSS could do that via the web app, that was pretty much the only reason I used the capy reader app. I'll have to test it out, thanks! I'm using Sage-Like. A Firefox addon. My preferred method of use is reviewing the RSS headlines and reading the article in the browser and Sage-Like is perfect for this as it is a sidebar addon. I used tinyrss self hosted until had some issue updating
Since then îm very happy with selfoss https://selfoss.aditu.de/ self hosted Tiny tinny RSS- self host + android app I use FoxBot (https://github.com/antfie/FoxBot) which delivers important RSS topics to my Slack. Nb I created this tool. Self-hosted Miniflux, https://miniflux.app/ Super minimal, I have MANY feeds, and it just does the thing very well. Feedi (https://github.com/facundoolano/feedi) Self-hosted. I like the news feed design and deboosting of already-seen entries. Self-hosted FreshRSS instance. I use FeedMe in Android to connect to it. is feedme ouen source? i dont see it on fdroid Reeder Classic on Macs and iOS. https://reederapp.com/classic/ I use self-hosted FreshRSS as the sync backend. A big fuck you to rssDaemon on Android which came out with a 3.x to 4.0 update that nuked all my feeds (this was a few years ago. I switched to Feedly and it's been great. QuiteRSS, available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and OS/2. I use NetNewsWire on Apple’s platforms and Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows. Both are free. Thunderbird is a bit more…unrefined…compared to NetNewsWire, but it works fine. Self hosted Fresh RSS but Reeder as client on Mac and iDevices Great reader, I have been using it since Google Reader went away. I use https://fidder.app, which works in the browser and Installs it as PWA on mobile. I use NetNewsWire on iOS / iPadOS, as a front end to a self hosted instance of FreshRSS. I host FreshRSS using docker on an old Raspberry Pi. Self hosted CommaFeed https://github.com/Athou/commafeed I tried several after Google Reader closing.
At the end I went to selfhosting a miniflux instance.
I like a lot the minimalistic interface. Tiny Tiny RSS, self hosted on a cheap virtual server. Self hosted miniflux via the excellent web UI. Biased, but https://usedigest.com TT-RSS, I do not like it much, but it's the more apt ready-made to quickly skim many posts from many feeds... Wrote my own in Elixir, needed some features like auto-star. I'll possibly release it in the future. NetNewsWire Miniflux via NetNewsWire. Both are great — I could gladly live with Miniflux’s web UI; it’s that nice. I have my own Next loud instance with the RSS plugin enabled a d the companion app on my phone Works fairly well. I’ve been using the following RSS aggregators since the mid-2000s: * Google Reader – until it was shut down. * The Old Reader – from early 2015 until I became dissatisfied with its lack of features. I was a paying user, and while the developer was always courteous over email, no amount of feedback convinced them to add functionalities that had become standard among competitors, such as filtering by keywords. * Bazqux – since a week after the November 2024 U.S. election. For my own mental health, I decided to filter out any news containing keywords like "Trump" or "Elon", and it has worked great so far. How I Read My Feeds: * On my laptop, I actually enjoy using Bazqux on the web, though I slightly customize its CSS using Stylus. * On iOS, I use FeeddlerPro, which previously served me well when connected to my The Old Reader subscription. Evaluations & Alternatives: * During my search for the right RSS aggregator back in November, I evaluated Feedbin, Feedbro, Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire, NewsBlur, ReadKit, and a few others. * One bridge I haven’t crossed yet is consuming YouTube via RSS. Since every channel already has an RSS feed, this approach would allow me to filter videos by keywords as well. Is it me or are RSS feeds making a comeback on HN? Very happy to see this trend! I believe HN has always supported RSS. The Old Reader with FeeddlerPro as mobile client, since Google Reader shut down. Feedbro lets me read on my regular browser. No need to put up with special UI. Feedbro is great. It has none of the arbitrary limitations that many of the web-clients impose for monetisation reasons. The only downside (or upside depending on your perspective) is that it is a local solution. You can only access it on a specific device, and it won't be syncing when that device is turned off. Elfeed on Emacs, on Linux and Windows. I tried several RSS readers for years, then, being an Emacs user myself, I gave Elfeed a go and never looked back. One key binding to open full articles in Emacs EWW (for those feeds providing only previews), and one to play media with mpv and yt-dlp. Best solution ever (for me) to get daily disenshittified web contents. On mobile, there is nothing I like, I consider Feeder on Android the least bad. Inoreader I use Reeder it’s not the best but simple and does what I need. FeedMe on my Android phone pulling down feeds from FreshRSS on a VPS. I moved to theoldreader.com when google reader closed. Elfeed (emacs package.) I'm using Bazqux reader, well worth paying for Inoreader, it's free and works like a charm NetNewsWire (Apple platforms only but excellent) Feeder on Android, simple, decent enough. newsboat: https://newsboat.org/ Self-hosted CommaFeed. Works great. I built my own called Stratum. Elfeed on Emacs of course. Only NetNewsWire (iOS) I use Reeder Classic on iOS and the Mac (the pre-enshittified version that does not have a subscription model). I will likely stick to it until it’s completely unsupported (which it isn’t), although a key part of the experience for me is read item syncing via Feedly. I also use Feeder for Android on my Supernote Nomad. It has the nice side benefit of creating EPUBs I can save/annotate/share. I very much prefer to use a native app, and have no use for web-based RSS readers (I have created my own GPT-based AI summarizer that generates custom digests - https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/01/12/1730#daily-news-d...) I’ve also got a soft spot for NetNewsWire, but don’t really use it since the above works for me to skim the equivalent of 200+ feeds over breakfast (I’m posting this from inside Reeder on my iPad mini). The Old Reader NetNewsWire Wrote my own. RSS Guard Miniflux Self-hosted FreshRSS. Simple and reliable. It just works. Elfeed on Emacs of course yarr - the best