I am looking for a RSS reader to start using. The big names seem to all have subscription services and that is just too much for me.
Are you using an RSS reader (or alternative) and if so, which one can’t you live without?
Feeder on android.
I take a slightly different approach to RSS that probably doesn’t work well for everyone but is perfect for me.
I get all of my RSS delivered via email by rss-to-email services. I then use filters to sort these updates into dedicated folders. So for example most of the updates go to “News” some feeds go to “Videos” and so on. I even have a few feeds that go directly to my inbox when I want to know about them right away.
The main benefits are:
- I already have email clients that I like and am used to.
- Feeds and read/unread state are already synced across all of my devices.
- My email has powerful filters available which allows me to further organize.
The main downside is that I haven’t found an email client that pre-downloads images whereas this is a fairly common feature of dedicated readers. But this is a very minor issue for me. (Maybe I’ll send a patch to K9 some day)
I’ve been using this approach for almost a decade and am super happy with it. In fact I created my own rss-to-email service (FeedMail) in the past year to get exactly the behaviour I wanted. It is a paid service (but really cheap) but there are also ad supported options like Blogtrottr (I used their paid plan until I created my own service).
I have a self-hosted Nextcloud instance with the News plugin. That fetches the news, but I actually read it on my phone or PC. Whenever I read a feed on one device, it automatically syncs up and marks it as read on other devices. As far as actual clients are concerned, you can see the list of apps that can connect to Nextcloud News here. I would hesitate to say I couldn’t live without it, but the app I use is News (yes, just it’s just News on F-Droid). I’ve used it for years and it’s great!
This is a setup specific to my situation, however. If you’re looking for something simple, have a look at Liferea, QuiteRSS or Akregator for PC. As for Android: there’s a bunch and I’ve honestly only used just the one I mentioned, but I hear Feeder is good!
For Android there’s also Nunti, available on f-droid iirc
Yes, what I would love to have is synchronization, so that I can have same feed on all my devices (Android and Linux). I use Liferea on my desktop so far, but it lacks synchronization service. I wouldn’t like to selfhost just to get better RSS experience, but if there’s no other opportunity I will have to, and it will probably by Nextcloud for its News.
Emacs.
I read my feeds on Firefox using tt-rss’s webapp. I self host a tt-rss[1] instance so I can archive the stuff I care about.
Friendica 😂
I read my news mostly on my phone and use spaRSS for that. It’s quite simple, lightweight and fast and does the job. You can find it on F-Droid
Read You is a great one for android; it has material you and is customizable.
yep, I’m using this, it’s great!
I use the EXCELLENT ‘Feedbro’ addon for Firefox on PC, and the similarly EXCELLENT ‘Feeder’ on Android. Both are open source with no ads, no subscriptions and no bullshit. Check them out!!
On Windows, I used to use FeedReader Desktop. On Linux and BSD, I use Liferea. On iOS, I use RSS Mobile.
When using my computer, I just recently started using fluent reader. The UI is pretty clean and the few keyboard shortcuts fit my limited needs for an RSS reader. It also has filtering, which I guess pretty much all readers have.
When using my phone, I use Read You. The reasons are pretty much the same, simple UI, easy to use, etc.
