Intro
Let’s start with a quick refresher on what things used to be like circa… 2008?-ish in terms of common RSS usage, what feeds were available, maybe Google Reader if it existed then. Easy to forget what things used to be like before everything enshittified.
Why RSS? Self-host RSS?
- Realized I was fed up with reflexively reloading the same few websites every day, and not reading as many interesting newsletters, independent blogs, and more substantial stuff
- Getting deeper into the Indie Web movement, and slightly trying to recapture that feeling of *finding great stuff on the internet* from the old days
- As our centralized way of experiencing the web through e.g. Twitter continues to dissipate, building your own aggregator is a way to broaden your reading/exposure without having to load up 50 websites every day
- Really needed to aggregate a bunch of sources for my emulation newsletter, and not being happy with Feedly's limitations
- Can be a solution to article reading limit paywalls on some sites
- I was kinda fantasizing about reading apps that offer really nice font treatment etc instead of being beholden to a website's design. It's not always better, but some sites aren't as mobile friendly. And this I could customize.
- Why pay for a hosted RSS service when I already put the work into building my home server and paying for electricity etc?
- What’s the basic infrastructure you need here? Server, scrapers, clients?
- How does it work on your phone?
RSS self-hosting options
- FreshRSS - The one I went with for ease and it is often recommended for being incredibly easy to install and having a nice balance of features and support and updates. In Unraid I literally clicked install and set the port and was off and running.
- Tiny Tiny RSS - Also quite popular, lots of features, looks nice. If you look through Reddit threads you'll often see some comments about the developer being not very nice when responding to questions or feature requests; I'm sure they get a lot of those that are very annoying so I'm not necessarily holding that against them. It has a "Share anything" feature I really like the sound of, where you can add an arbitrary website into your feed as a "read it later" kind of option. But it wasn't on Unraid and FreshRSS is a liiiitle bit newer and seemed just as recommended
- Miniflux - Really stripped down, minimalist design, ideal if you want a pure text no bullshit reader
- Selfoss - A bit of an older one not seeing active releases for a bit, but seems pretty mature. I didn't look into it too much as I didn't even know about it when I first chose FreshRSS.
- There are many others out there, but FreshRSS, TTRS and Miniflux are the names you're going to see recommended most. We can link this list of Awesome Self Hosted on Github, the reader section contains like 20.
Lots of not-self-hosted readers and services: Feedly, Inoreader, Feedbin, etc. Lots of options here and they can offer some advanced features or options you might prefer; haven't looked too deeply into those because I wanted to take advantage of my server and not pay money or be annoyed by restrictions of a free account
FreshRSS self-hosted
Why this one?
Was broadly recommended and (critically for me) available right in the Unraid community app library -- on Unraid it is possible to install whatever Docker container you want manually, but if it has a repository added in community it's literally a click and done
Basic features / usage
- You can have multiple user accounts if you want
- Visual manager for grouping your feeds into categories, drag-and-drop if you want, very intuitive
- Add the sharing methods you want from a dropdown selection: Archive.org, email, Mastodon, Reddit
- Totally customizable keyboard shortcuts for switching between view modes, articles, toggle read, all that kinda stuff
What I especially like about it
- It just runs! Since I installed it, I've had to do zero problem-solving, just tinkering to my liking.
- I can manually re-order my categories to put my more-read categories up top, like SF, Gaming, Tech
- I can choose per-feed Visibility: Show in important feeds, Show in main stream, or Show only in its category (or straight to Archive)
- Stuff is simple and works like you'd expect out of the box, but there's deep customization if you want to mess with filters, how often feeds refresh, how many you keep before purging, adding labels etc.
- Something I don't use, but advanced users probably do: an HTML+XPath (Web scraping) option for creating feeds based on specifying web page elements like headers etc. (I found the below tools like RSS Proxy were easier since I don't really get XPath)
- Easy to use with a variety of reader apps that support Google Reader API -- I'm doing the majority of my reading on my phone, currently using an open source one called Read You
- Explain what the Google Reader API is and (more importantly) how it differs from RSS (and worth addressing what the state of Reader even is these days; does it still exist?)
- It's possible to link this together with a "read it later" kind of solution too -- here's an example of someone who uses FreshRSS + the open source app FeedMe which has Integrations, including for open source read it later app Omnivore. Is that too many apps? Maybe!
Limitations / drawbacks
- By itself, doesn't have the advanced sorts of features of something like Feedbin where you can easily pull in YouTube videos, podcasts, tweets, etc.
- The web app isn't the most beautiful UI, but I find it very functional and it has quite a few skin options that don't change the whole layout but do change the look quite a bit. I'd barely consider the visual side a drawback though, as if I'm at my PC I'm using it functionally, and I want to do most of my reading on my phone.
Extensions
There are quite a few on Gitub - I haven't messed with these, but they can do things like...
- Add YouTube embeds inline to web reader
- Add a reading time estimate
RSS: additional tools
- RSS Bridge - Another tool I've started hosting. Can be used to create RSS feeds from a variety of specific websites
- I used it for a Patreon feed for a Patreon I follow
- Note, had to whitelist options so I could choose from all of them
- There are like 450 or something it supports, it's an open source tool so different contributors have created them. Possible to create your own if you're interested.
- Other examples: Justwatch (streaming shows), Lego Ideas that have X number of supporters, an ActivityPub Bridge for a username, NIntendo Software updates, One Fortune a Day, PCGaming Wiki
- RSS Hub - Basically seems like a better version of the above, with a big community of contributors making custom feeds for tons of sites
- Easy Docker install, then you just need a browser extension. Config the extension by adding your RSS Hub port and your FreshRSS or other aggregator address (it supports a bunch). When you go to a site it will pop up feed options, a link to documentation and a DEEP LINK TO YOUR RSS INSTALL TO ADD THE FEED
- It'll also surface the website's basic RSS feed for you, which is nice, and obviously there are lots of tools that can do that for you but for some reason I was a dummy and would go hunting around for /feed /rss etc trying to find it.
- Doesn't do Patreon though!
- RSS Proxy.migor.org - Stick a website into it and it'll generate a feed for you. You can also self-host but it wasn't available as a quick Unraid package and I just used it for one feed
- Used it for Edge of Emulation, as I couldn't find a feed on the site
- It does its best to read the page and identify what would constitute new posts. Doesn't always work though. FreshRSS has a built-in feature to essentially do this too, but it's manual and confused me
- Full-Text RSS - Another self-hosted to take summary feeds and websites that cut off the article and give you the full text, and custom rules. Haven't used yet as I haven't needed it
- Kill the Newsletter - Service that will take a newsletter and turn it into an RSS feed for you via a generated email address. Substack blocks this though.
A few quick website shout-outs