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.

  • Father_Redbeard@lemmy.mlEnglish
    19·
    12 days ago

    Miniflux is great. I use Wallabag as my read it later app and selfhost both on a cheap VPS. They’re tightly integrated but Miniflux supports several other integrations

      • Father_Redbeard@lemmy.mlEnglish
        6·
        12 days ago

        I’ve found the PWA adequate for my phone usage. I found a custom CSS that is sort of a Gruvbox that I really like.

    • Pixel@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      11 days ago

      I really liked Miniflux and its clean design too too, but I found without an adequate categorization functionality, it quickly became overwhelming. Since I don’t check my RSS reader as often as I should, it eventually got overwhelming and I had to switch to FreshRSS.

    • robalees@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      23·
      11 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·
        11 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.

  • ghost_towels@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    11 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!

  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    12 days 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.

  • tkw8@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    12 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.

    • neinhorn@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      12 days ago

      On iOS, I’ve used Reeder 4 and 5 for many years. It’s great. It’s been renamed to Reeder Classic. Worth every dollar!

      The new Reeder is a multi format feed reader. I like the classic RSS only format.

  • morph3ous@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    11 days ago

    I use NetNewsWire. Since I am happily entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, it works great with its iCloud syncing. This way I can use it on my phone and laptop while not having to set up any server-side infrastructure or rely on a third party to host anything. (Granted I am relying on the iCloud storage for device syncing. But it did not involve any kind of setup and the files are encrypted such that Apple cannot read them.)

  • Emberleaf@lemmy.mlEnglish
    41·
    12 days ago

    I use the FeedBro add-on for Firefox. It’s highly configurable and works like a dream. I’ve not found anything better, honestly.

  • abeorch@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    11 days ago

    Might not be the answer you are looking for but I use Friendica - So I can pull in content from RSS/Atom as well as ActivityPub feeds. I sort of separage into Channels and Groups news related stuff seperate from actual people. I then use a number of different ActivtiyPub apps like Fedilab, Racoon to access my Friendica account

  • kinkles@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    31·
    12 days ago

    Use feeeed for iOS. Looks and feels more modern than a lot of the other RSS apps but without any stupid bs. Free with no ads. Has a built-in reader mode that strips out article ads. Developed by one very awesome dude.

    It can handle more than just RSS content too- you can follow Bluesky/Mastodon accounts, YouTube channel uploads, subreddits, and more with it.

    I highly recommend changing the default view from “cards” to “list” so you can see more content.

    • tkw8@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      12 days ago

      I couldn’t get this to work with FreshRSS. Do you know how to integrate it with the FreshRSS api?

      • kinkles@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        12 days ago

        I was able to import the demo feed successfully, but I’m not sure if it’ll work for every FreshRSS feed.

        • tkw8@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          12 days ago

          I appreciate your effort here & the screenshots. Unfortunately, this isn’t what I was looking for. This just imports a “dumb” feed and doesn’t actually integrate with the API. Integrating with FreshRSS’ API, (the app OP mentioned), allows the RSS reader to interoperate with the FreshRSS application. For example, if I read an article on my mobile device, it will be marked as read on FreshRSS. So if I later pull up my feed on Newsboat (on my linux machine) or Readrops (my android tablet), those same articles won’t be presented to me again. Also, if I’ve made any customizations regarding my home feed in FreshRSS those will also be reflected in these other RSS Readers. That’s why the API is the preferred way to connect to these other readers.

          I just didn’t see a place for a user/API key input within feeeed.

  • peaceb@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    11 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.

  • Showroom7561@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    11 days ago

    FressRSS gave me a UI I was looking for on both mobile and desktop, and it “just works”.

    My only complaint, and I’m sure this isn’t a feature found anywhere, is that I wish you could actually delete an article, not just “archive it”. Some of the stuff that gets through on RSS is unfiltered NSFW crap, and I really would rather not have that on my home server!