Ask HN: Which RSS reader do you use?

I have been using RSS since early 2000s and currently I am settled on Feedly.

> Either the built-in web support is poor or it stops fetching the feeds or renders then poorly.

I guess I am good with Feedly, and Google Reader and everything before that, is because I dont use the RSS Reader to read the content. I am only using RSS as News Headline [1]. And then will either Command Click, Right Click Open New Tab, Simply Click on it, depending on which OS and browser I am using to open them in a new Tab inside Browser.

Which is also the reason why I could end up with hundreds of tabs open. And I read them one by one. For these type of heavy browsing usage I recommend Firefox > Chrome > Safari.

So for my usage I actually think RSS should be a function inside a browser. But I know a lot of people use RSS reader differently.

[1] Which is also how I use Twitter as well. I simply have a list of people I follow and read those list only. So for me I dont ever understand why people are so upset with the For You Tab. But I guess I am the minority and I use it differently.

I’m selfhosting both miniflux (after being a paying customer for a while) and freshrss. Main reason for adding freshrss was to test the flaresolverr plugin. I haven’t been able to get it to work, but I kept using freshrss.

If you’re interested in how well-behaved your client is, you can read Rachel’s posts.

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/29/score/

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/08/02/fs/

NetNewsWire - https://netnewswire.com

I use it with my iCloud and it's synced on my Mac & iPhone. It just works!

https://www.inoreader.com

Feeder on Android, simple, decent enough.

Newsboat for reading in terminal / TUI. I've used it for years and it's quite capable for my needs.

https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat

I have been using Newsblur[1] since Google Reader turned up it's toes. I have been very happy with it. Nice and stable.

I use it lots through both the browser and its Android phone app (has an Iphone app, too) and both have been great.

[1] https://www.newsblur.com/

Self-hosted Miniflux, and ReadKit on my Apple devices to access it.

https://miniflux.app https://readkit.app

I've used Miniflux for a long time, and its content manipulation features allows you to work around some of the oddities of RSS feeds you come across.

I was dissatisfied with the available RSS readers, so I wrote my own called Follow https://follow.is . It addresses several key issues I faced:

- Optimized display for images, videos, audio, and notifications

- Specialized optimization for RSSHub, allowing subscriptions to thousands of websites that don't offer RSS, such as X, Instagram, and Telegram

- AI-powered translation, summaries, and a daily important news summary

Reeder on iOS / macOS: https://reederapp.com/classic/

With Inoreader as backend: https://www.inoreader.com/

I've been using Inoreader for a few years now and I'm pretty happy with it. Its reliability and feature set is the right balance for me. I've written about its pros and cons [1], the main pros for me are:

- Very smooth experience between web, android, and iOS apps (I’m mentioning this first, as many other apps I’ve tried are flaky)

- Mark as read while scrolling (Very useful for quickly shortlisting items from the feed. This is probably the main reason I’ve been able to replace Inoreader with social media apps.)

- Rules to auto-delete duplicated items or if the title contains specific words.

[1] https://saeedesmaili.com/posts/my-content-consumption-workfl...

Sadly, I'm another one on thunderbird email client.

It's not great, but it generally works.

My major complaint is that articles are not locally stored, so if the online article goes away, its just gone.

I found this ironic, given that as an email client, a major function is local storage of messages.

After Google Reader was shut down, I found TTRSS and use it since then. It works and there are some great extensions like FeedIron available to process RSS feeds before the will integrated into the UI

I really like Mailbrew. Daily email digests from RSS feeds (and a bunch of other stuff).

https://mailbrew.com/

https://bazqux.com/

Five years now.

https://freshrss.org

I self-host it

I use the Feedbro [1] extension in the browser and the Flym [2] app on Android. I'm quite satisfied with both.

[1] https://nodetics.com/feedbro/

[2] https://github.com/FredJul/Flym

I use feed2mail, which is a Python program that turns RSS Feeds into Maildir emails. I have my own patchset on top to address some issues.

https://hg.sr.ht/~mmatalka/feed2mail/rev/mmatalka-patchset

Self-hosted FreshRSS, NetNewsWire on Mac, Fluent reader on linux/windows/ios. Any reader compatible with Google Reader API works with FreshRSS, and Fluent was the nicest UI I've seen (hasn't been updated recently, but I don't need new features).

I’ve been using the following RSS aggregators since the mid-2000s:

* Google Reader – until it was shut down.

* The Old Reader – from early 2015 until I became dissatisfied with its lack of features. I was a paying user, and while the developer was always courteous over email, no amount of feedback convinced them to add functionalities that had become standard among competitors, such as filtering by keywords.

* Bazqux – since a week after the November 2024 U.S. election. For my own mental health, I decided to filter out any news containing keywords like "Trump" or "Elon", and it has worked great so far.

How I Read My Feeds:

* On my laptop, I actually enjoy using Bazqux on the web, though I slightly customize its CSS using Stylus.

* On iOS, I use FeeddlerPro, which previously served me well when connected to my The Old Reader subscription.

Evaluations & Alternatives:

* During my search for the right RSS aggregator back in November, I evaluated Feedbin, Feedbro, Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire, NewsBlur, ReadKit, and a few others.

* One bridge I haven’t crossed yet is consuming YouTube via RSS. Since every channel already has an RSS feed, this approach would allow me to filter videos by keywords as well.

Big RSS user. Loved Google Reader till it shut down, then switched to Feedly which I liked well enough, but it keeps cramming in business features I don’t need. Switched to Inoreader last year and have loved it. Writing this comment in its web view right now.

https://www.theoldreader.com

Great reader, I have been using it since Google Reader went away.

Feedly. It's fine.

"Feeder" on Android. Built-in web is the Android web client. But I let it open the links with Firefox anyway. I just use the RSS Reader to get the list, actual reading I do in the Browser.

I've been using email since the Google Reader shutdown. The short versions is that I filter (almost all) feeds into a few folders that have no notifications. Now I have a offline-first reader that is already synced to all of my devices.

The long form: https://kevincox.ca/2013/06/27/email-as-rss-reader/

I'm still running a self-hosted Fever instance, it still didn't break down with newer PHP versions.

Using Reeder Classic as an RSS client. Also something threatened by unwanted updates.

If you are this picky, then write your own. That's what I did:

https://airss.roastidio.us/

You are welcome to use but don't complain the lack of functionality. I wrote it to suit my own need.

I use my own RSS reader [0]

Recently I also extracted web reading into a separate library which should make writing new projects like RSS readers easier [1]

[0] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

[1] https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy

Brief in Firefox (on my Mac laptop).

Also Feeder on Android: https://github.com/spacecowboy/Feeder

I've used almost all of the ones listed including rolling my own RSS to ePub script. I've been using Readwise Reader lately which has been a great blend of vimish keys, read it later, tagging, and AI summaries.

QuiteRSS, available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and OS/2.

The Old Reader (https://theoldreader.com) in the browser.

Newsraft, before I was using Newsboat.

https://codeberg.org/newsraft/newsraft

Here is a video to see how it works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE-PhXnvp30

Elfeed

https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed

Miniflux (miniflux.app)

I used to use FreshRSS, but there were some minor pain points that eventually pushed me to find an alternative. Miniflux has been great so far. It's very minimalistic, which also makes it very lightweight to self-host, as I do, but you can also subscribe to the hosted version for about a dollar a month.

Anyone looking to mix up their own RSS feeds? I've recently launched Mashups

https://www.mashups.io

It's the good ole Yahoo Pipes clone! Would love for those who want to mix RSS feeds to try it out!

newsboat: https://newsboat.org/

I self host freshrss (https://www.freshrss.org/), super easy to set up via docker and it doesn't required some over provisioned dependency setup (DB servers, etc...). It has nice/familiar keyboard shortcuts and a clean and fast interface. My only complaint is that the cloudflare-ifiation (aka enshittification) that is slowly ruining and rotting the internet prevents the fetching of RSS feeds from some news sites from your presumably affordable non hyperscaler VPS instance.

When using mobile I use https://capyreader.com/ which has first class intigration with freshrss; meaning you can add/remove/view feeds via the app and have the changes sync with freshrss. Also, probably my favorite feature of capy reader, is that when you want to view the content of an rss article that is only a summary or headline (because few people publish the full content of their articles in the rss feed anymore), you can just press a button and it will fetch it for you and display it in the reader without sending you to a browser. So much happier and more accurately informed since moving back to RSS where I can choose what I want to see vs having it filtered/fed to me via some biased algorithm.

I tried several after Google Reader closing. At the end I went to selfhosting a miniflux instance. I like a lot the minimalistic interface.

Feedi (https://github.com/facundoolano/feedi)

Self-hosted. I like the news feed design and deboosting of already-seen entries.

I use FoxBot (https://github.com/antfie/FoxBot) which delivers important RSS topics to my Slack. Nb I created this tool.

For me it's Thunderbird, "Blogs & News Feeds" section. After version 120-something it stopped resizing images on article load - this is the part I find unsatisfying. Otherwise it just works.

I use NetNewsWire on Apple’s platforms and Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows. Both are free. Thunderbird is a bit more…unrefined…compared to NetNewsWire, but it works fine.

Feeder

https://github.com/spacecowboy/Feeder

I use NetNewsWire on iOS / iPadOS, as a front end to a self hosted instance of FreshRSS. I host FreshRSS using docker on an old Raspberry Pi.

Self hosted Fresh RSS but Reeder as client on Mac and iDevices

I’ve been using Feedbin since Google Reader shut down. Been very happy with it. I access it through the web on desktop and using Reeder 4 on iOS; both work well.

I use https://fidder.app, which works in the browser and Installs it as PWA on mobile.

Self hosted CommaFeed https://github.com/Athou/commafeed

Tiny Tiny RSS, self hosted on a cheap virtual server.

FeedMe on my Android phone pulling down feeds from FreshRSS on a VPS.

NewsBlur

NetNewsWire

https://netnewswire.com/

Wrote my own in Elixir, needed some features like auto-star. I'll possibly release it in the future.

Miniflux via NetNewsWire. Both are great — I could gladly live with Miniflux’s web UI; it’s that nice.

https://www.netvibes.com

Is it me or are RSS feeds making a comeback on HN? Very happy to see this trend!

I have my own Next loud instance with the RSS plugin enabled a d the companion app on my phone

Works fairly well.

If I’m on iOS I regularly use “feeeed”: https://feeeed.nateparrott.com/

It has some extra functionality for certain websites like HackerNews so it shows points, etc.

I used tinyrss self hosted until had some issue updating Since then îm very happy with selfoss https://selfoss.aditu.de/ self hosted

Inoreader, it's free and works like a charm

Self-hosted FreshRSS instance. I use FeedMe in Android to connect to it.

Inoreader

Feedbro lets me read on my regular browser. No need to put up with special UI.

Self-hosted CommaFeed. Works great.

Elfeed (emacs package.)

Only NetNewsWire (iOS)

NetNewsWire (Apple platforms only but excellent)

Self hosted miniflux via the excellent web UI.

https://bazqux.com/

I built my own called Stratum.

The Old Reader

The Old Reader with FeeddlerPro as mobile client, since Google Reader shut down.

Elfeed on Emacs of course.

I use Reeder Classic on iOS and the Mac (the pre-enshittified version that does not have a subscription model). I will likely stick to it until it’s completely unsupported (which it isn’t), although a key part of the experience for me is read item syncing via Feedly.

I also use Feeder for Android on my Supernote Nomad. It has the nice side benefit of creating EPUBs I can save/annotate/share.

I very much prefer to use a native app, and have no use for web-based RSS readers (I have created my own GPT-based AI summarizer that generates custom digests - https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/01/12/1730#daily-news-d...)

I’ve also got a soft spot for NetNewsWire, but don’t really use it since the above works for me to skim the equivalent of 200+ feeds over breakfast (I’m posting this from inside Reeder on my iPad mini).

Wrote my own.

Nextcloud News, still using v24.0 - which is no longer supported but for which I made a patch to make it work in current Nextcloud versions - instead of the current v25.0 rewrite since the former is functionally superior over the latter for my use case.

TT-RSS, I do not like it much, but it's the more apt ready-made to quickly skim many posts from many feeds...

Reeder Classic on Macs and iOS. https://reederapp.com/classic/

I use self-hosted FreshRSS as the sync backend.

Self-hosted FreshRSS. Simple and reliable. It just works.

Elfeed on Emacs of course

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