Yet another paying NewsBlur subscriber, from the earliest days. I use them to subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds.
I've been increasingly using their search feature, which allows you to search for text across a "folder" (group of subscriptions) or across all your subscriptions.
Another nice feature: If you enter just the home URL for a web site when creating a new subscription, it'll automatically search commonly used URLs (/feed, /rss, etc.) to find their RSS feed for you.
Feedly is fenomenal, its my 2nd most used app after email. I really love the advanced features of mute filters, web alerts and Leo - Feedly's AI Engine.
Have been on the feedly train ever since google axed reader, was able to transfer all feeds via import ++ will help you get some kinda feed (can break with big site redesigns but has been pretty solid) from sites without RSS. Haven't needed to shop around at all since 2013.
One more vote for feedly from me! One of the few online subscriptions I don't mind at all paying for. I especially like the ability to auto-generate email addresses for newsletters to "turn them into" RSS feeds within feedly.
I don't know about ios, but on Android there's a program called "Palabre" that lets you log into feedly. I like the interface, precache + readability features much more.
I haven’t had any major issues, but on the iPad the navigation is sometimes in limbo. I believe this is caused by using the keyboard/touchpad instead of touch.
I use Feedly Classic which is clocking in at around 37 MB. But I am looking at the other apps on my phone and the majority of them (maybe 90% roughly estimating) are well over 59 MB. Chrome, for example, is almost half a gig. What device are you using that 59 MB is an issue and are you also eschewing all the other apps that are that big or larger?
I've been self-hosting miniflux [0] for a couple years. Rock solid performance, deployment is easy, upgrades are small but meaningful, and doesn't use anything exotic in the tech stack (mainly Go, some vanilla JS, persists data in PostgreSQL).
I mainly browse on my laptop, but it's pretty decent on mobile.
Self hosted miniflux as well but kept running into 403/429 errors when using reddit rss feeds, went back to freshrss.
The biggest issue is that once you invest in a reader, your data aside from the feed opml, is stuck in that reader so your favourites, labels, and content can't migrate.
Interesting feedback on reddit RSS feeds. I'm only subscribed to a single reddit feed, but it's totally possible that miniflux was spamming requests and that led to a rate limit. It isn't super customizable in terms of how frequently it pings to see if new items have been added, it's a fair criticism.
I'd gently push back on the migration issue. As long as you're going the self-hosted route, all of this data exists on your machine. A tool for painless migration from X reader to Y reader might not exist, but at least it's feasible to build. If your data is in some hosted solution, you're at the mercy of the provider to implement data exports.
Also a happy miniflux holster. On Android I use Miniflutt [0] as a client, mainly for the mark as read on scroll feature. Any fever API compatible app will work, though.
They run annual Black Friday specials that end up giving you 18 months for the cost of 12.
They have advanced filtering and rules.
They have some social features I don't use but that approximate what Google Reader was mourned for.
I really rather wholeheartedly recommend them.
The only negative thing I could say about them is that they seem rather close-minded in a rather non-P.R.-friendly way to feature requests, and don't seem very interested in improving the product in ways their customers request, although they do, however, still (slowly) improve the product. It's not in stasis as many other products sometimes tend to be (cough Remember the Milk coughcough)
That having been said, to me, the product feels rather rock solid as it is in its existing functionality, and to me, it feels like a solid power tool.
Been using it for the last two years and it’s been great so far. Not sure if sub price would be justified for other people but for me the cheapest paid tier covers basically everything I need from a reader.
I pay for Inoreader as it most closely matches the Google Reader social experience for me. You can follow other users, share articles to your feed for other users to discover and comment back and forth. I always said I would have paid Google to keep Reader going, so I put my money where my mouth was with Inoreader. I do find it’s search capabilities somewhat lacking tho. Mobile app is decent, desktop website is great.
I went from Google Reader to Digg Reader to Inoreader free to Inoreader paid. Has been pretty solid I have only found one bug - sometimes it doesn't show you the same article you clicked on. Tried to report that but they wanted me to go to lengths to convince them it was not my browser environment - uninstall all extensions etc. Otherwise very happy with it.
There's a free tier with ads which I don't mind since they're non-intrusive (I honestly can't tell when the last time I noticed an ad was, and I use it daily).
Also a happy NNW user. I'd been using Feedbin, which is also good, but since I'm a Mac and iOS user, I switched to using NNW with iCloud syncing, which has been working great. It's so nice to have fully-native apps!
I seem to be the only person who doesn’t like NetNewsWire. The fact that you still can’t configure global settings that cover all feeds makes it useless for me.
I connect/subscribe it to various things - one of which is a previously curated FreshRSS instance, running in a docker container. So reeder connects and updates read/new feed additions too.
I pay for Bazqux reader because I’d like for it to stick around as a small business with a vested interest in serving my feeds and not pivoting to newsletters or algorithmic news or whatever:
I really like miniflux, but I really wish it had a weighted post ordering rather than a simple chronological ordering. I posted a feature request about this earlier this year[0], but the gist is this:
If you subscribe to some feeds that post 100+ times a day (like a major news outlet) and others that post only once every couple months or so (like many personal blogs), you'll never catch the latter because those posts are always drowned in a sea of the former. Reddit deals with this problem by weighting posts from each subreddit you subscribe to so that your frontpage contains content from as many of your subs as possible.
All I want for Christmas is for this idea to get some traction. Hoping to make the time to hack on this myself Q1 of next year.
It's a tricky idea to implement in a way that doesn't violate the "principle of least surprise".
Personally, I "solve" this problem with existing settings by excluding NPR/NYT/New Yorker from my global unread feed. They belong to a category (/news) that I can choose to visit if I want to. I find myself not visiting it that often, personally.
That being said, I have thought of implementing something like this. Maybe something that "aggregates" posts into 24 hour buckets, so they'll still show up in your global feed, but won't occupy 80% of the screen space any more.
I've had a few feature ideas too. I'm currently paying for the hosted instance of Miniflux, but it's nice to know that self-hosting a personal fork with the exact feature set I want is incredibly easy: small code base, single executable, minimal dependencies.
Not much. It just has its own button on the home screen (iOS) and behaves (mostly) like a native app. A browser bookmark would work as well.
Miniflux is designed to work well on a small screen with touch input. So the fact that, unlike some other options, it doesn't have a native app is not too much of a limitation.
Not sure if it's just me, but I have not used a RSS reader as a serious reading software for years. Instead, I only use a RSS reader software to quickly go through all the unread items and send interesting articles to a read-later or bookmark service. The main reasons are:
- Some feeds only provide title/summary and not the full text article (yes, I know there are full-text extraction service, but last time I tried them, none of them was perfect, and I don't want to play the guessing game -- "Am I reading the full article, or a broken extraction?")
- Some feeds are just better to be read in a web browser. e.g.: Project release notes on GitHub, which usually come with links to PRs, commits...etc, so I need to open several browser tabs to consume the content anyways.
- Some personal blog sites have very beautiful (or interesting) designs that I find myself actually enjoys poking around.
- Ad-blocking -- given the current popularity of RSS, I don't know if it really makes sense financially for websites to do so, but I notice some feeds do inject ads.
- If I ever need to click a link in an article, jumping from a reader software to a browser is too big of a context switch that disrupts my flow -- just let me go through all the feeds right now, and I will decide how to prioritize the most interesting ones and allocate my reading time later.
For my use cases, Unread on iOS gave me the best experience. All the gestures optimized for single-hand operations are just fantastic. Sadly, they switched from one-time payment to monthly subscription and I can't justify the cost when I only use it in a very light way(just for sorting items). Reeder is not as good, but is comfortable enough for me.
> I have not used a RSS reader as a serious reading software for years
Same here but I think we were mostly forced into it. Site owners care more about getting you on their site than the quality of the content. There's no incentive to include a bare bones version for RSS so, if they even have an RSS feed, it's just links. Aggregate sites can't even include the content. Also, there's just too much multimedia content these days, a proper browser will always be more reliable for viewing it. I really don't mind it. I just love not having to re-scan over headlines I've already seen or intentionally skipped over.
Same here. Currently I don't read my feeds in the RSS reader, but I mark what interests me and send it to Pocket to read later in this application or directly on the original website.
Self-hosted instance of FreshRSS [0], Readrops [1] as the client on Android, html2rss [2] for websites that don't have RSS feeds and AtoMail [3] to get newsletters as RSS feeds instead.
Edit: forgot to mention RssBridge [4] to get tweets that match certain criteria as an RSS feed. RssBridge also provides access to many other platforms.
QuiteRSS on Windows. I was using newsbeuter/newsboat when I was on Linux and I really liked it. My wants from a reader are very basic though, I'm really only interested in getting the title and links, I don't care if it even has a content viewer beyond text-only.
I use NetNewsWire these days, but for anyone who wants to dabble in RSS with minimal investment, I highly recommend FeedBro, a well-executed Firefox add-on.
It has a highly customizable UI.
It handles all the fetching/refreshes/storage right in your browser, no need to install anything else or self-host a backend.
And you can import/export OPML feed collections, so you can easily switch to another solution when you outgrow it.
The only downside I've found: it doesn't sync between machines (at least, not for free). That's totally fine when you're just trying out RSS for the first time, but it does get annoying if you eventually want to read on, say, a phone, tablet, and laptop in different situations. For that use case, NNW + FreshRSS is my current, excellent solution.
Drop Feeds[0] - a Firefox browser extension[1] that continues in style of the original Sage (and Sage++) extensions. You can configure it to only show unread feeds and automatically poll for changes, so you always have the latest updates right there in your browser sidebar without having to go to a different application or site.
I used to use https://blogtrottr.com which I do still think is a good product, they just didn't quite fit my needs so after about 8 years I ended up creating my own.
I have used Blogtrottr since Google Reader went away, and I love it. It's great not having to check yet another app for updates, and all the filtering and labeling tools of modern email clients can be used.
I’m using Reeder with Feedly. Reeder makes processing a lot of feeds pretty easy.
I keep hoping Feedly will help separate the wheat from the chaff in my feeds with their ML work, but it seems to require me doing more than clicking on what to read to identify my likes and dislikes.
I’ve played with Matter and Readwise Reader, and so far I’m not impressed. I like Readwise in theory, but the RSS reading UI is a bit slow though I might need to tweak the settings to make it quicker.
Feedbin for sync and for email ingest. A key fact about this is that unlike Feedly and Newsblur, it keeps old content indefinitely. That means that if I don't check feeds for a while, or something is too heavy to read one month, I don't lose it forever.
iOS: Unread, which is just supremely beautiful. I'm amazed that the "double tap to mark read/unread" interaction isn't standard.
Mac: Reeder, which is nice and flexible though not perfect.
On Android, Handy News Reader from the f-droid.org app store works well, once I went through all the settings and customized it, and got used to it. Except now it doesn't auto-fetch (it used to) and I don't know if I did something wrong, but manually fetching new stories isn't bad.
It is a local reader -- no account required, no server storage, but stores everything on the phone.
I've also used NewsBlur which I would probably like more if I paid. One thing about Handy News Reader is there is a way to see the URLs of existing feeds, which I have not found how to do in NewsBlur.
Subscribed back in the day to a lifetime deal for Feedly, which is very good at filtering out themes/keywords I'm not interested in.
On the app side, I haven't found anything more enjoyable than Reeder (mac and iOS). Keyboard shortcuts are great too.
For many years, I used Feedity for generating RSS feeds from webpages without one. They've since renamed to New Sloth, and also have a nice although basic feed reader. I like its article grouping feature, and use the whole package (feed creation and reading) for my research work on a daily basis.
Currently using Feedly, but my subscription is ending in January. I'm thinking of taking advantage of an Inoreader offer that is active until December 28 and switching to there.
It is advisable?
I don't usually read my feeds in the RSS service, but I look at the headlines and mark what interests me to send it to Pocket and read it quietly there or on the original website of the site.
Whats with all of these RSS stories suddenly on the front page today? Feels like exactly what PG was talking about in The Submarine[1] but who would be behind pushing RSS feeds all of a sudden? Is there a Big RSS lobby I don't know about?
I think it's stemming from the Twitter migration trend. Lots of people moving to Mastodon are talking about their personal blogs or thinking about starting one up again. Zeitgeist is thinking about taking back content ownership and creating tighter communities. I'm diggin' it.
It's better and more customizable than Newsboat, plus there is an option to transfer everything from the Newsboat to it. It is not really a reader but a parser, but that's what makes it great.
I use Quite rss on the web, Akregator in Linux and Feeder on Android. I have over 500 feeds so most services ask for payment to get all those enabled. These work great, are open source and usable for me and the best is I get them for free.
The Nextcloud News app, I started using it when it was still the Owncloud news app many years ago. Initially I used it in combination with the related Own/Newscloud News app for Android but just use the web interface now since this is always up to date and does not need any synchronisation.
Having everything happen locally on my own machine is great - I never want to be in the position of losing Google Reader again. And the option to do non-interactive refresh makes is almost as nice for high volume feeds.
Initially I used Mailbrew, but for the last 5 months I've been happily using my own open-source tool through Obsidian: https://github.com/piqoni/matcha
It is a daily digest and supports also terminal mode.
I happen to be using my own. I wrote my website from scratch in Go and decided to build a RSS reader into it. Anyone can view the list of articles I’m reading at https://dwayne.xyz/reader
+1 for Reeder (iPhone only) using Feedly for free as the backend (RIP Google Reader)
I only do RSS browsing on my phone, triage what I'm interested in to emails sent to myself or send to pinboard for archiving/maybe visit later (although probably moving away from PB soon)
Feedly with the Feedly Android app, which syncs unread items with the desktop web app (so unread == not visited). I don't read anything in Feedly itself -- makes me wonder if there are RSS apps focused just on aggregation.
ttRSS, because RSS2Email is next to useless in the modern crappy feed usage where full articles are NOT on the feed... While as a concept it's very nice since I use notmuch, so I can manage mails and especially search&tag them very well.
I've used elfeed, it demand too much time to skim many posts, similar to Miniflux who is quicker but still demand too much time. ttRSS allow to scroll marking read, that's enough for me. Feeds nowadays simply have much value as a tool, but too little values per mean post.
Gnus with scoring is nice, but again too slow to skim, even with scoring help.
Been using Feedbin with Reeder pretty much since Google Reader shut down. I’ve tried a bunch of others and always come back to this winning combo. Worth noting that Feedbin’s web app is also great.
Completely agree. I love theoldreader.com, and it's compatible with apps like Reeder. I used to host tt-rss, but I don't want to continually patch and update anymore.
Same here. Does what I need it to do, but I've noticed that it only syncs one-way with NetNewsWire (pulls feeds in, but won't update read status), unfortunately. It's still good enough for my needs as I'm not subbed to that many feeds.
rawdog (RSS Aggregator Without Delusions Of Grandeur) [1].
It's a simple script that I manually trigger once a day to check my list of feeds from a config file. It caches the known posts and generates static HTML with summaries of the new posts for me to browse locally.
I'm subscribed to Matt Levine's Money Stuff[0] about finance, computers are bad[1] about retrotechnology, and A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry[2] about history. The common theme through all of these is their focus on big picture systems, which I enjoy. I'm also subscribed to the Orbital Index[3] which is about space, and is more focused on small scale current events than the others.
Exactly the same setup on my machines. Works fine and can be integrated with any other sync programs as needed. A flexible and robust approach to RSS.
Newsboat is also a great option, for those who prefer a dedicated RSS app.
https://www.newsblur.com/