I’m new to RSS, and was wondering what RSS readers do you use?
I’ve tried a few of the popular options, but I’m not really sure which is good.
A lot of the ones I’ve seen lock having more than a few feeds behind a paywall. I understand why, but that kind of defeats the purpose for me. I want to be able to follow various creators, not 3 to 5. And you don’t see social media capping how many accounts you can follow. (or if they do I haven’t seen it yet)
Let me know if you have any thoughts or newbie friendly tips to add!
You could set it up yourself, but I just pay the $15 USD yearly subscription for hosting. It offers a (way too short imo) 15 day trial. You login at reader.miniflux.app
I like that it’s just a site I login into, automatically synced as a result via all my devices, but most of all I like its look and feel. Consider giving it a look. At $1.25 USD a month (currently), I’m happy with it.
But, yea, I understand free being hard to beat.
EDIT: I’m sure if you emailed / reached out to the creator, they’d be more than willing to extend the trial. That’s just my assumption though.
Feedly is the reader I use. Honestly can’t remember why I chose it in the first place over anything else but it does its job and is apparently allowing as many feeds as I want (I’m up to 15 so far).
I use Thunderbird. More specifically a fork called Betterbird.
I have it start up every time I boot my PC so I can start my day by checking my RSS feeds, any newsgroup activity and of course my email inboxes.
I also use a self-hosted freshrss (with the help of yunohost for hosting), connected to the software newsflash for GNOME ( Newsflash – Apps for GNOME ) on my computers to use a native interface (but I also use a bit the web interface, especially on phones).
I use Newsboat, a terminal RSS reader. Its very simple to use, simple to manage, and its text only, by default white on black, so super legible on my janky laptop. It doesn’t automatically request updates, so no getting blocked from feeds because of request spam.
I syndicate my feeds across devices using syncthing, but only ever really read RSS on my desktop.
I might switch to Thunderbird as I’m using that for email now, but I kind of like keeping email and feeds separate, checking RSS is its own little ritual, removed from day to day comms.
Oh this looks cool, I use a firefox fork, not sure why I’d never considered a Thunderbird fork before.
Newsboat user here, too. I keep mine all on one device as I’m rarely reading when I’m out and about. My favorite feature is the bookmark capability. I hit ctrl+b and it bookmarks the post with the title, link, and a note into my journaling program of choice which is also a terminal program.
I use QuiteRSS (no idea why its website’s index.html seems to be gone all of a sudden).
I think I tried feed readers until I found one that worked the way I wanted; viz. a standalone program that doesn’t impose any limits or require any signups. Didn’t go with Thunderbird because I wanted my e-mails separated from my feed items.
I haven’t seen anyone mention RSS Guard yet, which is what I use. It’s incredibly serviceable! So far it’s handled every feed I’ve thrown at it, hasn’t had to clear its database in at least 2 years so far, and includes a utility to scan any page for rss/atom feeds. Works on linux/mac/windows, and is free.
For years I was using Reeder on both Mac and iPhone and I was using iCloud to sync across devices.
After a conversation with @jsonbecker I decided to ditch iCloud and move to Feedbin because Feedbin has a neat feature and that is a public RSS feed for starred items.
I have not blogged about it yet but the feed is already added to my site and should be available to be auto discovered by any RSS feed reader.
I still don’t know if I’ll stick with Reeder since the developer has released a new version that I really don’t like because it is trying to be more than an RSS reader and act as some sort of unified timeline to consume content coming from multiple sources.
So we’ll see what happens, so far the old version is still working fine and i’ll stick with it untill something breaks and i’ll be forced to move.
I wish NetNewsWire felt more like what I want. I’ve been using Reeder since 1.0 and it’s hard for me to break the habit on something I consider closer to perfect. But I agree, despite what the developer has said, it’s clear his heart is no longer in “Reeder Classic” and so it’s not clear to me it’ll get the kind of love and support I’d like to see. Not that the app doesn’t feel nearly “complete” to me, but being a “dead end” makes me nervous.
I haven’t had any cross-platform needs yet as I read on my phone primarily. And if I ever need an article on my computer (perhaps to follow a coding guide) I’ll just share it to my browser via Firefox Sync or something similar.