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Why Everyone Should Still Use an RSS Reader in 2024 (lifehacker.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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RSS is still the best way to track the news on the web, and these RSS readers can keep you right up to date.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (2 children)

For those who wanna #selfhost I hear

https://www.freshrss.org/

is pretty good. I kinda gave up on RSS when all artists moved from Tumblr and websites with RSS to the disgusting social networks ...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

One question. Why do we need a web app for something that was designed to work locally?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

To sync across different devices maybe?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Do you need that? You only need to sync the feed. There are formats like OPML for that. At worst you need a file sync tool like syncthing. The feed contents seen by the readers are all the same.

I'm yet to see a good reason why feed readers need to be web apps. This is worse than the case of git - a decentralized tool is taken and made centralized.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

When you have 100+ feeds you really want to avoid reading twice the same entry. It's the single most important feature in an RSS reader for me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Agreed. The syncing can be managed other ways. The only thing I’m left with is using on a work computer for some reason, where one’s own devices aren’t available/permitted? But that’s probably not a common usage case.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

So the OPML file does handle the read status as well? isn't it just a format to export and import feeds inside a reader?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Depends on your use-case obviously, for me it's very nice to have all feeds and read status on all devices (laptop, phone, tablet) and don't need to add a new feed to all devices or set it up again when I change phone, reinstall Linux etc. It also has user-management, so you could have accounts for friends and family and even expose it to the internet (which I wouldn't at this point) or but it on a private mesh / vpn like Tail-/Headscale.

Edit: Whoops, I was talking about self-hosting. Having it as a web service has the same benefits if you don't wanna tinker with tech, obviously, (with the caveat that people from that service know what you read ...)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Anyone interested can find (usually free) externally hosted freshRss and TinyRss hosts on the chatons website. Select one of those in the "based on" drop down menu.

I've tried both and like neither. As far as I can tell, they only have a small number of apps. And none of them work offline. With a regular RSS reader you can refresh it when you have internet access, then everything is available when you do not. Like an email client or any other such software.

But it might be suitable to you. So check out the chatons.