HACKER Q&A
📣 KomoD

Do you use RSS? If yes, which reader do you use?


Do you use RSS? If yes, which reader do you use?


  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
One I wrote myself. I think all the feed readers that look like mail readers or news readers or that show you N boxes with feeds from N blogs are the reason why "nobody uses RSS" and it's telling that people are still making failing RSS readers with the same failing interfaces obsessed with making you ignore items you already saw that failed 20 years ago.

This one is different.

It gathers content through Superfeedr, stores the content in an ArangoDB database, processes it with scikit-learn, huggingface transformers and all that. The user interface is written in Python w/ aiohttp and is all SSRed. It runs as fast as a desktop application, is accessible on my tablet from anywhere through Tailscale, and doesn't have any loading spinners because it is too fast for that.

The primary interface looks like TikTok for text (it shows me one thing at a time that I classify) but there are some other rudimentary screens for viewing lists of classified content. It scores 73% on a metric that TikTok gets 80% on with a very simple model so I feel like I am not doing so bad.

On a good day it ingests 1200 articles, proposes to show me 300, maybe I really see 200.

If there was one glaring deficiency it's that Superfeedr is only cost effective for high volume feeds (say arXiv CS papers or The Guardian newspaper), I couldn't afford to subscribe to 2000 blogs that publish once a week.

There are many directions to improve it but the most interesting ones are to move away from the "non-social social media" use case and towards ones that support "filter 5000 abstracts from PubMed", "filter through a huge number of profiles looking for sales prospects/possible employees/etc."


👤 jayknight
I use inoreader (https://www.inoreader.com/).

👤 kevincox
I use RSS-to-Email then read them in my mail clients. Most things get routed to a few folders without notifications that I open when I want news.

I'm using my own RSS-to-Email service https://feedmail.org but I've also used https://blogtrottr.com/ in the past.


👤 pauljonas
My own app concoction, written in Ruby & Sinatra and JS-less at the moment, one of these days going to upgrade and enhance as I wrote it while I was out of work during COVID days. As I age I don't have the energy to keep pace with side projects anymore.

After Google Reader I used Feedly for years, even ponying up for a Pro subscription. But I was forced out as they capped on sub total (even as a Pro customer) and I was unable to add new feeds & the tools to identify and prune "dead" feeds (even there, I treat my RSS pool as a stream to wade in when needed / desired and didn't want to delete even inactive feeds, just feeds that got hijacked by spam farms). So I wrote my own.

Initially had grandiose vision of opening it up to anyone but it needs some UX work 1st (and a better DB model than a SQLite DB on a shared host lol).


👤 seraphine
Yes, self-hosted miniflux (https://miniflux.app/)

👤 eTomte
I use maubot-rss to pipe the feeds into a Matrix chat room, where I read them with the Element client.

👤 jaeckel

👤 warrenm
I use the website I built - https://datente.com

I don't read every entry

I don't hit it every day

But it's what I use


👤 s0l1dsnak3123
I use Elfeed inside Emacs. This blog article gives a flavour for what sort of customisation Elfeed is capable of: https://noonker.github.io/posts/2020-04-22-elfeed/

👤 marzetti
After a fairly exhausting search of alternatives, I ended up with Newscracker .. it copes well with a large number of feeds, has good capability for classification, and I can tolerate the single ad up front (on about 60% of starts).

👤 hammyhavoc
Feedly and sadly not feeling it these days. Would like to switch to something self-hosted and open source, but haven't been impressed with what I've tried.

👤 jszymborski
Ive been using Liferea which works well enough https://github.com/lwindolf/liferea

👤 Georgelemental
Yes, self-hosted FreshRSS. It has good search and full-text fetching

👤 LMMojo
TT-RSS (Tiny Tiny RSS). Best thing I've find for my needs. I'm not excited about how they started doing updates a few years ago, but it just keeps on working.

👤 suddenclarity
Feedly Classic. Would love to move though since they are doing their best to worsen the service every year. I guess there isn't much money in RSS applications.

👤 menshiki
NetNewsWire is by far my favorite solution - https://netnewswire.com/

👤 mvaliente2001

👤 wGPWgvFyUc4awA6
I use Feedbro, seeing as I spend most of my time in browser anyways and it's pretty excellent.

👤 4ensic
I use QuiteRSS reader on Windows.

👤 aukaost
Newsblur, looks nice on the web and the Android version works well for me.

👤 OscarCunningham
I use Feedbro since I reach the maximum number of feeds on Feedly.

👤 expertentipp
yes, thunderbird

👤 andrei_says_
NetNewsWire is great on iOS.

👤 giaour
Yes, I use Outlook.

👤 nathants
reeder for ios without an external service.

👤 dankwizard
i use tiktok rss is old tech, stay breezy

👤 jcv_fortran
Thunderbird

👤 daltont
Yes, Feedly