The State of RSS Feed Readers

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71 days ago · 15 min read3033 words · Tech · hide · 9 comments

Two boats docked behind a berm. Introduction Many years ago (over a decade) I wrote an article about RSS Feed reader alternatives after Google announced they were killing Reader in March 2013. That article attracted a fair amount of attention, including a request from RedHat to republish the article on their blog. On the ten-year anniversary of the death of Google Reader, the Verge published Who killed Google Reader?(pay-walled article), indicating (to me) that even a decade on there was still interest in the product. Today, with the rising profile of the FediVerse and the IndieWeb, it seems RSS readers and feed aggregation are seeing a bit of a renaissance with the likes of Bubbles. I've also noted several feed reader sites showing up as referrers on my sites. And, just to make things more interest, as I was working on the first draft of this piece, Rishabh P. Sharma posted an article on his site called: FreshRSS vs My Own Feed Reader: A fierce competition. I took this as yet another…

Bryce Wray @BryceWrayTX@hachyderm.io 71 days ago

Putting in a good word here for NetNewsWire, an outstanding FOSS RSS app for macOS and iOS.
https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire

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- unattributed 𓂃✍︎ @unattributed@gotosocial.social 71 days ago
  
  @BryceWrayTX That looks nice. Definitely in line with FreshRSS, TTRSS, RSSGaurd, etc.
  
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- Crystal Lee @crystaljjlee@mastodon.social 70 days ago
  
  @BryceWrayTX +1 on this! This is a piece of software that's never let me down so far. It's not the sexiest app, but that never described RSS in the first place.
  
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James Wilcox @jameswilcox@techhub.social 71 days ago

Even @kagihq News page (https://news.kagi.com/) is powered by RSS feeds. I miss the days of fever grouping together articles so this was the best alternative I've found recently.

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- unattributed 𓂃✍︎ @unattributed@gotosocial.social 71 days ago
  
  @jameswilcox @kagihq
  I hadn't seen Kagi's newsreader before… It's kind of like the readers I wasn't covering, but is very nicely done. I might actually start using it. Thanks.
  
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- kdude @Kdude@mastodon.social 71 days ago
  
  @jameswilcox @kagihq FYI, Kagi News uses AI to create that feed. So by using it you trust both Kagi and some LLM to decide what news you get to see... which determines your view of the world.
  https://news.kagi.com/about :
  "Kagi News reads public RSS feeds of thousands of (community-curated) world-wide news sources and utilizes AI to distill them into one perfect daily briefing. "
  
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  - unattributed 𓂃✍︎ @unattributed@gotosocial.social 71 days ago
    
    @Kdude @jameswilcox @kagihq
    That is true, they are using AI to summarize articles and build their feed.
    But, to their credit: they actively source everything, adding endnotes to point to the specific sources for the information. And they provide a complete linked list of all the source articles that were used in the creation of the story. It's a much more transparent use of AI than we've seen from just about any other news outlet that has tried it.
    And, by providing all this information, you have the option of reading the actual sources and judging for yourself.
    Basically, they are using AI pretty strategically to do they kind of research that we should all be able to do, but would take waaay too long.
    
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Harsh Shandilya @msfjarvis@fantastic.earth 70 days ago

Putting in a vote for Miniflux in the self hosted category, it's reliable, minimalistic, and trivially extensible via the first party ability to inject custom CSS and JS.
https://miniflux.app/

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- Daniel @caeruleus657@masto.es 63 days ago
  
  @msfjarvis +1 on miniflux! Super simple and very good. Self-hostable but they also have a running instance that is quite inexpensive and very stable
  
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