I use Newsblur[1] in the browser. The best part of Newsblur for me, is its intelligence trainer.
Suppose you want feeds from website A, but don't want certain stories tagged with "mice", or titles containing "epistemology", and you only want to see articles published by an author named "Joyce Smith", you can do that.
It's pretty great. Reading RSS feeds has become so much more pleasurable. The articles that do make it past the training filters are almost always what I do like to read.
This. I tried bazzillion different RSS readers / aggregators and Newsblur was the only one that resonated with me:
1. No-nonsense web UI. Simple, fast, logical, intuitive.
2. No ads
3. Decent free tier
4. Great intelligence trainer
5. Good search (finally!)
6. Pre-caching news content on your mobile device (great Android client by the way!) so when it comes to reading content, it comes up instantly.
€36/annum feels a bit steep (it used to be €12/annum when they started as far as I remember) but it works for me.
I don’t use the training features much, but I love the consistent UI across the web and iOS interface. You can also host your own instance (I do not though) and use the iOS with it.
Feedly. Switched when google reader died, and honestly it's filled the hole perfectly, does all it needs to do, has premium options to support them. Fast, and clean.
Happy to answer anything, I work at Feedly. In the Pro+ you get both AI and also Newsletter feeds, Twitter feeds, Reddit feeds, public boards, soon Web Alerts
I think the fact that you've paywalled Reddit RSS feeds which are free is scammy. I get asking money for improving something, but there is no way to just subscribe to Reddit feeds as is.
No, I don't think so. For example, they have a feature that allows to follow a some twitter feed. Twitter does not have RSS feeds, so they wrote a code to handle that and charging money for that. I'm totally fine with that.
Reddit has RSS. Here is an example - http://old.reddit.com/r/all.rss . To subscribe to it, you need to pay 12 dollars per month to Feedly. And this I think is scammy.
Correct, Reddit RSS are not reliable, but most importantly, the rate limit always banned us in couple days every month. There are some tools available, but they will run into this issue eventually when they'll hit critical mass of users.
The problem with Reddit feeds is that without using their API (that costs us money) we were getting rate-limited by their servers, so even when we have moved polling to Pro users only, we were still being blocked, so the only way was to use their API to bring Reddit to everyone.
I set up an AWS API Gateway that proxies to Reddit RSS URLs and then I just give the APIG endpoint URL to Feedly. Unless you have a lot of reddit feeds or high traffic ones, you probably won't even break out of the APIG free tier.
I am also happy user of Inoreader. The best feature it has is the ability to subscribe to the "global" feed. For example, when I'm waiting for some specific thing (like product launch or announcement) I can make a global search instead of some subscription.
I used to use Feedly, but it was too slow for my taste. Started using Inoreader a couple of years ago and I love it enough to pay for it. Has all of the display and sorting options I could want, as well as keyword highlights and more.
Switched to inoreader very recently, after having been on Feedly ever since Google reader died. Honestly don't see much of a difference in terms of functionality, but the interface looks and feels somewhat better, so I'm sticking around for now.
Same, the word highlighting feature is something I use a lot.
Makes it easy to spot some articles just by scanning for an highlighted word.
I bought multiple years of "Supporter" level while it was cheap and some features I like were moved into a more expensive tier, and I'm glad I did because the features are grandfathered in until I need to renew.
This thing is packed with features, yet simple to use. Not only is it the best RSS reader I've ever used, it's up there in the top 10 of all software, of any kind, I've ever used.
Of all the RSS readers I have used I found this to be the most functional and UI friendly.
The only feature that I would like it per-folder scan tracking (Mark items as read when you scroll past them). It is currently system wide based on the View types (magazine, list, etc.)
> Miniflux is a minimalist software. The purpose of this application is to read feeds. Nothing else.
> The Miniflux layout is optimized to scan entries quickly.
> The design of Miniflux is inspired by Hacker News, Lobsters and Pinboard.
> Miniflux uses Javascript only where it’s necessary.
And the content extraction for truncated feeds, customizable with CSS selectors, is an absolute killer feature that I use heavily.
I'm very happy to pay an annual subscription fee and I haven't looked back once since I started using it. I'm eagerly waiting for NetNewsWire to add support for the Fever API[3] so that I can use it with Miniflux. But the web UI on mobile is good enough to be honest.
Recently they had a database outage. After that they decided to archive unread items after 60 days. If you're like me and have a lot of feeds, this really doesn't work. I've decided I won't renew my subscription next year.
http://www.bazqux.com/ - I paid for a lifetime subscription a couple years ago and never looked back. The interface is great is both desktop and mobile, since it’s online everything is kept in sync across devices and I can configure the interface to my liking. I tried many RSS readers and nothing came close.
Unfortunately, I don't have enough resources to optimize site for screen readers. I think that mobile/desktop apps handle accessibility better so you could use them with BazQux Reader or other service.
Note that the forum for tt-rss has a category called "Gas Chamber" for hiding threads, and the maintainer actively defending this choice[1], which might or might not influence your choice. It definitely does for me.
+1 for tt-rss. I like a lot of the other options (I used feedly for quite some time) but at the end of the day, self-hosting is the only guaranteed way I will have a feed reading service as long as I want it.
Inoreader. It allows me to add rss, twitter and youtube and apply rules and filters as to what to include / exclude.
I don’t like twitter but sometimes that’s the only way people communicate or share their art. Inoreader lets me add twitter users with a filter (e.g not interested in tweets without pictures (artists), not interested in retweets, only interested in tweets that contain ‘released’, ‘beta’ or ‘rc’ (software).
Really cool for trimming down the noise and a smooth, clean experience.
I read RSS in Emacs using mu4e. I used to use Gnus, but it's (a) really slow and (b) causes Emacs to freeze (since it's written in Emacs Lisp, which isn't concurrent); in contrast mu4e delegates work to a separate process, and is generally faster (e.g. using an indexed Xapian DB).
I'm a sucker for mindlessly checking feeds, so I only poll feeds every few hours to avoid a drip-drip of new posts throughout the day. I do this with a cron job (now a systemd service). This job also converts RSS and ATOM to maildir, since that's all mu4e supports.
It turns out there are loads of programs for polling+downloading+caching+converting news feeds, but I couldn't find any that just convert; so I made my own by stripping down one of those existing projects ( http://chriswarbo.net/git/feed2maildir ).
Reeder on iOS/Mac with Feedly as the back-end and a handful of private feeds being fetched directly. Has a great Read Later feature as well as a working Reading Mode that save me a lot of time.
Miniflux like so many supports the Fever API which means I can use almost any RSS app on the platform I need it on. I also wrote a small sidekick for Miniflux that I can use to filter posts I don't like (Sponsored posts etc.): https://github.com/dewey/miniflux-sidekick
Miniflux is great, small, single-binary, easily configured with envvars and just gets out of the way. Gets good development and feels great. I don't use a specific reader - just webapp on whichever platform, works well.
Feedly as the backend, Unread as my (iOS) reader, it's a very nice looking application and doesn't scroll weirdly like Feedly does/usedto. Instapaper to save things for later or to read on a computer to act on something.
Unread also does an Instapaper-like reader view which you can turn on feed-wide for those shitey RSS feeds that only give you the excerpt.
i don't like how it's not trivial and inconvinient to make it show all articles in one feed, so i wrote my own very simple one that shows all articles from all feeds in one big feed
I put “Read Later” things in a pg database via Retool[1], fetch RSS/Atom a few times a day into the same database, and serve it to Fiery Feeds[2] via the Fever API spec[3].
I self-host FreshRSS on a cloud server. It was pretty straightforward to setup as a docker container. The default has it running a cron job every 20 min to check for new content. You can use the FreshRSS web interface for reading but I typically use Reeder (iOS) to read my content.
neither user friendly, nor obvious, but it's nice ...
The summary of Thunderbird basically.. It has like all the features imaginable, and the core ones are done ok-ish, but after years of using it I still feel like throwing it out every now and then because of all the weirdness and quirks and straight-up bugs.
> Adding a new feed is neither user friendly, nor obvious,
> but it's nice to not need an extra program to read feeds.
Agreed. It's also nice to have the ability to search everything, I sometimes forget where I read something.
One thing I wish it could do is take a standard web page (HTML) and allow me to build a feed out of it. Or at the least keep any eye on the page and tell me when it changes.
It is perfectly acceptable to me that neither functionality is easy to work with, because in return I get all my non-instant messaging in just one application.
I'd probably really like it if it was possible to interact with WhatsApp and possibly Slack inside Thunderbird as well.
I especially love Feedbin's ability to ingest email newsletters, so that I don't have those crowding my inbox. It's also a great way to follow the select few Twitter accounts I'm interested in.
Not trying to be a shill, just love the service! :)
You haven’t mentioned what you want to use RSS for, so I‘ll try to provide some context as to how I use it.
Feedbin account linked to NetNewsWire on my iPad, iPhone and Mac. I chose Feedbin because it is 1. A paid subscription, I forgot what I paid, but $50/year I want to say and 2. A ton of RSS apps support it. I like the clear cut relationship and expectations of being a customer, not merely an entitled user with a free account, and I like that Feedbin is effectively platform agnostic and not tied to a specific client as long as you have a client that supports it.
NetNewsWire is my preferred client, but this is as much out of complacency as anything else. I’ve used some version of NetNewsWire for close to 15 years now. The current v5 series of releases is a very neat client, has a good team led by Brent Simmons developing it, and while I’m not sure what the feature is called, has a neat reader mode that can load the whole post even in partial-post feeds.
I use RSS mainly for blogs and webcomics, but I have a couple of news sites loaded in there as well. Most of those also send me Newsletters which I have automatically forwarded to my Instapaper account from my Inbox. I skim most posts, read some others in NetNewsWire, but if an individual post is long and I want to do more than skim, it goes straight to Instapaper. If it’s worth keeping for reference or to read again, it goes from Instapaper to my Pinboard Archive. I mark the news feeds as read about once a week regardless of whether I’ve gotten to it or not because most of it has a shelf life and if there was anything important I probably heard about it on some podcast.
Ephemeral or the kind of stuff you would like to archive?
Just keep that in mind when making changes to your setup in the future. RSS is a very ephemeral medium, and migrating to something like Feedbin or Feedly after you have something in place will cause data loss. That’s one of the reasons I use Pinboard.
I used to use Feedly, but found I didn't check it often and lost track of things, I wanted a way of getting RSS by email so created https://rssby.email/ during lockdown.
What bugs are you seeing with NC News? I use it as well, mostly without problems. The recent introduction of the sync interval setting led to some odd sorting problems in the feed but that is easily solved by setting the interval to the old value of 300 seconds. For the rest it generally 'just works'.
Same. I've looked at other self-hosted RSS services, but found no functionality that would make me want to spin up another service.
I also use two free online services to enhance the experience: PolitePol to create a feed where there isn't one, and SiftRSS that allows me to filter through the feed to only include (or exclude) items from the feed.
I used to use Newsblur [0] after GReader shut down, but then they raised the prices and as I pretty much used none of their fancy features I switched to self-hosting Tiny Tiny Rss [1]
Elfeed, an Emacs RSS reader. Recently discovered I can jump to feed searches (eg news, longform, tech, etc) using Bookmarks and now very happy with it.
Interesting you point to the 6 years time frame, I didn't realise how long I have been using Feedly. And I use RSS Reader even before Google Reader. The workflow is the same for the past 20 years. Command + Click a bunch of links. And that's it.
This has been a process for me. I started out using TinyTinyRSS and a few other apps. I always wanted an RSS reader that I could use anywhere on any device. I have finally settled on rss2email. I can read on any device I can access my email. I have setup an email just for rss feeds (rss@mydomain.com) and use a server side filter to put the feeds in the correct mailbox. I love the idea of not introducing another app to manage something.
For mail I use mutt. Mutt and rss2email are a match made in heaven. I can quickly process the stuff I want to read and the stuff I have little interest in. Feeds like Hacker News can get out of hand quickly without the ability to quickly process...
They kept a bunch of the same shortcut keys and stuff that I liked about google reader. It's cloud based so you can pickup where you left off from any device.
I use (and pay) for Inoreader. I was a loyal subscriber to Feedbin for a few years but the developer made some UI changes for the worse, and then wasn't interested in feedback. After a couple of long outages, I decided to switch away.
It's what I use too. And except for getting a new logo a while ago, absolutely nothing has changed since I started using it, which I love. I hope it never goes away.
Meanwhile, Apple invents a new magical way to set the alarm time on their phones once a year, and it infuriates me.
Is anyone else having very old posts (e.g. published in 2003) float up as just published on top of their TheOldReader "all items" timeline? I subscribe to some blogs that include very old posts in their feeds and it seems like TheOldReader wraps timestamps around at some point.
I wrote to their support about it since it's getting annoying, but I haven't received any reply (I'm using their paid tier). I'm guessing its kind of a rare edge case.
Not for me, they're all in the right order, but I've only used it since a year or 2 after Google Reader shut down (was using Tiny RSS for a while). Maybe it's a particular feed that's messed up?
It's possible. I've looked at some feed sources and didn't see anything obviously wrong. I suspect TheOldReader also because if I go to view only a specific feed, the entries are sorted correctly newest-first, but displayed publish times go something like "... February 2003; ... January 2003; ... September 2020; 2 hours ago" but on hover the "September 2020" and "2 hours ago" change to their correct 2003 publish dates.
I'm using the Reeder app on iOS, it syncs with a bunch of services. Before I was using Fiery Feeds, but they switched to a subscription model and the app I had paid for wasn't supported anymore.
I'm using QuiteRSS for Windows, I like the UI and the functionalities it's been working good for me except for some crushes when I upgraded to Windows 10, but they are rare. And it's free.
Feedbro on Firefox. Takes nicely care of my ~200 feeds, and without the friction of some external program having to launch the browser.
Tiny Tiny might be an option if the feature set has evolved to justify running a server somewhere. Last time I looked, it didn't, but that's years ago. And anyway, it's probably a good thing to have no feeds on my phone.
The interface is pretty good, privacy is respected as far as I can see, service is hosted on their hardware, not in the cloud, the author is very responsive when issues arrive, and the code is available for self-hosting[2].
It is also how I keep up with people on Twitter and YouTube without having to access Twitter or YouTube.
Thank you for this! I've been a loyal BazQux user since Google Reader was killed off.
It Just Works, and I've been happy to pay the subscription fee every year. I have hundreds of feeds I subscribe to, from people who post once every few months to large composite feeds with dozens of posts daily. BazQux helps me stay on top of all that, and it's more than worth it for me.
I have used BazQux since Google Reader was shutdown and it has been great. The two times I have asked vshabanov something his response has been almost instant (neither time was due to a bug; the service has worked perfectly, for me).
I've been using BazQux for years and could not be happier with it. Only time I had to get in touch for an issue with a specific feed, it was fixed in a few hours.
I'm glad that it's back, but annoyed that the latest version is 10.15 only. I have a policy of staying one release back on Apple OSes that has served me well.
Self-hosted FreshRSS + Reeder on iOS. I haven't found a decent FOSS Android client that syncs with FreshRSS yet, unfortunately, so I just use local Feeder on there.
Switched to Feedly and used it for years after Google Reader died, I think it's pretty good.
I wanted offline reading though so I ended up rolling my own [1], it's a bit rough and I don't really need the offline thing since I'm at home most of the time but I still use it out of habit.
Tested a few others, e.g. the Digg Reader, around the time Google Reader was discontinued, but Inoreader was closest in functionality to GR so stuck with that.
I use newsbeuter. I like to keep mine running in a tmux window. Wasn't aware that a popular fork existed. Does Newsboat have any advantages over newsbeuter?
Nice. I live inside tmux as well.
As far as I am aware, newsbeuter is no longer maintained, and the newsboat fork exists to pick the thread. Newsboat gets continual bugfixes and has recently added some commands that fill holes in the macro system.
I've used a self-hosted version of Stringer for a while: it's a barebones single-user RSS reader with very few other features. Probably not great if you plan on following lots of feeds in different categories, but it's perfect for me: https://github.com/swanson/stringer
Slack, using the RSS integration. I have a channel dedicated to social watch, mostly HN through hnrss [1], and a channel for blogs and more article-shaped content.
I only use Slack as a "new article notification" system though, the reading happens on the original website where the content was posted.
Like a few others here, I use an RSS to email converter, although I'm using a custom-written one. The main difference from rss2email is that I'm not actually doing any SMTP - I'm just dumping files into a Maildir and letting isync do the uploading/downloading. The actual reading then happens mostly with Mutt (which also just interacts with Maildir).
Like some others have noted, using email as a storage mechanism reduces part of the problem (tracking which items are read/unread) to one that's already solved (by IMAP). Additionally, using isync lets me have local copies of everything; this used to be really important when I was a "poor" grad student, because I could do cool stuff like download a bunch of comics ahead of time on my laptop, then read webcomics/mailing-lists on the 2-hour bus ride. I still like having local copies of things on principle, although nowadays everybody is always-connected so it's not as useful.
This makes a lot of sense, because RSS is quite e-mail like anyway in so many ways: the feeds look like an inbox, where items are marked read and such.
Also, a lot of sites use email where they could (should?) be providing RSS, for updates and news stuff. So to see those in the same place as RSS feeds, either you use a common client for both, or convert one into the other.
Feedbin seems to permit receiving email newsletters as a feed, so that's one of the few making email into RSS, whereas the others all turn RSS into email.
I create a telegram channel and few lines of shell script and a systemd timer to feed it. Advantage is that I get to read the entire post fast without going to a browser or custom app (instantview only works only in mobile app). E.g. https://t.me/instant_news_tech
I use the Feedbro extension for Firefox, but grain of salt, I only just started using it a week ago. Not sure what features are good for Feed Readers, but this one is great for my office computer. I don't really "need" it to carry over to my other devices like Inoreader can do.
I self-host an instance of https://feedafever.com/ which works nicely with https://www.reeder.ch/ on my iPhone and Mac at home and also quite nicely online (at work, but psst, don't tell anyone).
Fever is unsupported, though [1], but it's still working nicely.
Once it stops working, I'll switch to something that's supported by Reeder, which is an indispensable piece of software for me.
Currently also using NewsBlur for Stackoverflow tracking with fetchrss.com for FB and other custom feeds, however, I am moving those into my second Inoreader account.
For GitHub project tracking I use BazQux, and still do.
It's a janky one page PHP file + either simplepie or picofeed for the backend; using flat-file lists to store the feeds themselves. And it's PERFECT for me. Been using it for years.
As a non-professional (literally, I don't program for a living primarily, I sometimes teach classes in beginner stuff) this is the kind of thing I'd love to encourage more non-professionals to do. No need for even "apps" here.
Feedly as the aggregator, Palabre on Android as the reader.
I rarely read rss on my laptop these days, but Palabre keeps the read articles in sync so I can hop on the Feedly web interface and resume at any time.
I was a fan of Inoreader, but after the licensing change it became too much expensive for my huge number of feeds.
So I discover FeedWrangler (https://feedwrangler.net/): it's a good system, very clean, with lot of interesting feature (like automatic filtering, 3rd parties integration, etc.).
The only lack is an Android client.
In the future I would like to migrate on self-hosted (if I found the time to reboot my home Docker Swarm cluster).
I self-host my own, since I found that other self-hosting solutions were too much of a pain to set up. It's brutally simple though, and basically only supports my RSS usecase (notifications, not consumption): https://github.com/rcxdude/nobsrss (if it looks dead from the repo consider it's still running fine and I haven't needed to touch it since then)
Newsboat using Syncthing to keep the state the same over my various devices. All the advantages of a web based reader without ever having to log in to anything.
Feedly. Switched to it when Google Reader shut down. It is fast and has a modern looking yet clean interface. Gets the work done with minimal distraction.
I then filter them into a folder and now I have a cross-platform synced RSS reader. I can also do any sort of filtering that I want with email filters.
The only real downside is that I haven't found a mail client that will pre-download images in the items. But I can read the text offline at least.
I wrote my own using nodejs. It's nowhere near complete enough for anyone else to use, but I'm enjoying building features as I need them. Thanks to covid, I just host it on my local network so I can browse on my phone since we are home all the time.
https://github.com/schwartzworld/rss
Does anyone else not use one? I get my news and reading content from HN, NYT, Google News, the national news service in my country and from Alexa which gives me news from CNN, Sky News and my national news service. I also check Twitter from time to time but I try not to see it's always negative.
BBC News is another source I browse to from time to time.
What I mean is, when I peruse the list of items that Google News provides I find the quality and level of interest to be really low. It's not that there is good stuff out there it's just that whatever drives this content seems to be promoting the crappiest stuff. Honestly, I can't understand how it can be so bad. If I just bring up the subreddit for my area the content is streets ahead.
I'm self-hosting selfoss [1]. Runs on PHP and sqlite (or MySQL), and also has integrations with some websites that don't support RSS feeds, e.g. Twitter and Reddit. Also comes with an app on Android.
Reddit suppports RSS quite nicely, I rely on it to follow my preferred subreddits without going to their site to check: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss
https://github.com/p-e-w/krill
I use krill because I like to get my feeds in a CLI. It also supports adding twitter. Development has stopped a while ago and I don't know of any active forks unfortunately.
I use https://cortadomail.com to get RSS feeds (and other sources) in email. I personally really like the workflow of getting a daily digest of all of my RSS feeds in a single email each day. (Disclaimer: I built this tool.)
I've noticed many web sites don't have RSS. I've set up Huginn, and it sends me emails from multiple resources in a digest form. I apply filters to emails from Huginn, creating a separate "feed" in my inbox.
Feeder.co extension - it's even supported on Firefox for mobile (or rather it used to be, Firefox broke extension support on latest builds). It's easy to open all the unread articles, it's lightweight and fast.
I was using the hosted Miniflux instance, until their database went out, and they decided that archiving unread items would be fun. Now I'm using what I've used for like the last 3-4 years now. simplerssreader.com
I'm still trying to find a good app for Android tablets that has a decent tablet UI and supports one of the major syncing services. On my iPad Pro, I was previously using Feedly + NetNewsWire, which was fantastic.
Miniflux, prior to that it was Feedly for a number of years, but I eventually opted for a self-hosted solution and it does the job well alongside Reeder for iOS. Some people may find it lacking in features however.
Very rarely though. It comes in very handy from time to time, like for instance when looking for something specific on Craigslist. Much easier to scan a bunch of feeds than to muck around with the website.
A couple questions about this. Does it allow me to see articles from a single feed, or do I have to look at everything in an HN like format? Also will it accept OPML import? I really don't want to add over 500 feeds by hand.
After firefox dropped support for live bookmarks I switched to the "Livemarks" plugin. Works the same as before: RSS is just part of your bookmarks menu.
Found nothing that had the perfect combination of what I wanted from an RSS feeder. After like 30 tries I gave up and made my own. Best RSS feeder in the world!
Prior to that I was using Miniflux, but I wanted to apply some filters to a particular feed and I realised that I already had a tool with advanced features for filtering and organising short messages with a subject and body: email.
I have a few webcomic RSS feeds as well as an RSS feed for an IRL standup comic's schedule. I also have an RSS feed for a particular church's weekly service.
Podcast Addict works for more than just strictly pure straight-forward pure podcasts.
I use it too, because it's the best one for my use case - it's not a website, it's in my distro's repo, and I just need something I can copy the links to feed items / open them in a browser rather than read them in the reader itself. (Most of my subscriptions are youtube channels.)
But it's very buggy. Every so often it pops up an old feed as if it's unread. Sometimes it adds new unread feeds with empty titles. I like to delete feeds after I've read them, but sometimes the delete option doesn't do anything, but if I change to another directory and back the item is gone.
There's long-standing open bugs for some / all of these.
I don’t think it would help. All of the value in Reader was its integration with the wider Google ecosystem. Just the mechanics of its RSS interface are easily copied (and have been).
rss2email. Goes straight into a folder in my mail account. I can read it from the Mail app on my phone, Thunderbird on desktop, and my web mail client.
Adjacent but related to this topic, I also use an RSS reader and I think it's something which a lot of non-programmers would really appreciate more. There are a lot of techy reasons why I like it (self-hosted is always nice, back-search is fun, I like the customization, etc) but especially during these stressful times, it's a great way of limiting obsessive scrolling in newsfeeds. I follow 300+ feeds, most only semi active so I can very easily get caught up on all the new article titles. Once I'm caught up, it's much easier for me be done and not keep scrolling. This is in stark contrast to other newsfeeds, and the control I have over the rss subscriptions means I don't get algorithmically manipulated to the same extent as other places. There are niche feeds I love and it's great having them collated
So three things: 1. talk to your friends about it, I've been advocating it to a lot of people and lots of them are interested. Feedly is relatively easy to setup for a layperson and showing them cool lesser-known feeds is a great way of getting them started (as you all know, there are niche blogs lots of places and the act of self-curation is really empowering). But if you self host, maybe offer to give them an acct...
2. I think gReader was a start but it was a slightly different newsfeed environment. Now everyone I talk to understands the dangers of newsfeeds and algorithmic manipulation, but they don't know what to do. I think there's a space for a RSS startup (or even feedly) to really press their advantage on self-curated feeds and no infinite scrolling that would appeal to a lot of people. The little RSS advertising I see are not focused on this
3. One thing people might miss is some twitter/fb/etc accounts which they know they like, and want to bring to their readers. I think a lot of people know the difference between the people they follow who they actually care about and the ones that are just on the same platforms. I'm thinking especially about Cory Doctorow's Adversarial Interoperability (https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6c-cory-doctorow-on-adve...) but if the platforms won't do it, having a free/open source twitter/fb/etc scraper that is reliable would be a huge win. I've tried some but a lot of them are buggy or expensive and it's annoying for a layperson. This could definitely be improved and I wish some of the platforms would export rss feeds too (e.g. youtube did and then it got weird). Also having easy integration to html-diff non-RSS websites would be great. I've used it to check for job postings, cdc news, etc, and I think a lot of people would like it.
All of which is to say, we have this old technology that is secretly adopted by a lot of websites (especially because of wordpress/etc which make it a default) and which could solve a lot of deep problems that a lot of people are struggling with. I think HN type people could really make impact here in expanding the userbase
Nextcloud [1] News [2] running on 'the server under the stairs' here at the farm. There's a few 'apps' which can be used in combination with it but I no longer use these since the web interface offers better performance.
https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/
Here is their "How to Support NNW" page. https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/T...