alt Hacker NewsThe RSS feed reader landscape
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If you're doing your own reader, please check Rachel by the Bay's Feed Reader Score Project: https://rachelbythebay.com/fs/
And follow the best practices: https://rachelbythebay.com/fs/help.html
Basically you don't want to hammer the server every minute or even every day if the feed updates once a week. Use ETags and Last-Modified properly.
Just gonna join the many other commenters shilling their favourite, mot mentioned rss reader!
I absolutely love Vore (the rss reader, not the other thing!!!) It's really simplistic, and beautifully refuses to do anything I don't want it to.
If you're in the Apple ecosystem (Mac, iPhone) NetNewsWire is an absolute delight. It's not a commercial product any more, Brent Simmons runs it as a (very serious) passion project. Here's a recent post by him explaining part of his philosophy for it: https://inessential.com/2025/10/04/why-netnewswire-is-not-we...
Crucially, it syncs feed read state between my laptop and phone.
I'll just shill my own feed reader here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re...
It currently only runs in Firefox but if anyone is interested, I'll Port it to Chrome since it now supports a sidebar interface.
I made this because I wanted to have feeds show up where I read them, in the browser, and I wanted it on my own device so nobody else controls it. No hosting, no payment, just a simple tool that lets me control what I read.
Bonus: if you try it you'll likely increase the global usage by double digits ;)
Self plug: I wanted to have RSS feeds on my browser new tab page along with other widgets, and there weren't that many great options for what I wanted out of a new tab page; so i created my own! https://newtabwidgets.com.
I find the new tab page to be the ideal location for RSS feeds as I can quickly see new updates each time I open a new tab (which is quite frequently!).
It's on the Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/new-tab-widgets/ejn...
This is a nice overview but is also obviously content marketing for Lighthouse, which, fine.
I use Feedly, and generally like it, but the issue with RSS has very little to do with reader front ends and largely to do with how a lot of people don't publish full articles on RSS, images don't work, etc. The demo images of all the readers are like best case scenario - most non-personal sites only publish a paragraph or two, if that, making the reader more of a link aggregator.
I've been using Docker containers for RSS Bridge and FreshRSS on my local machine, which has been a game changer, particularly with regards to following certain TikTok creators via RSS, meaning I can ignore the algorithm altogether. I wish it were more stable, however, the TikTok feeds can break from time to time...
NetNewsWire is great, and the developer is just in it for the love of the game and the open web.
https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/T...
Anybody know of a self-hosted RSS reader that can remember different views for different folders?
I'm using Inoreader which does that - I have a folder that is displayed as titles only, and a different one that displays as "cards".
I've tried a few of the more famous self-hosted ones, but none of them have that feature. I know that a keyboard shortcut can be used to change views, but my early-morning doomscrolling brain doesn't want to think about that.
Newsboat + miniflux is an excellent combination if you're CLI-addicted but want to access feeds from multiple devices.
For all the (justifiable) concern about the death of RSS, we have a glut of excellent options for consuming content through RSS. But I'm still sour about the Reeder redesign. At least the dev was transparent about building the tool he wanted to use but, ugh, it's barely in the same market as the others now.
Unless I misunderstand, it also misses that Newsblur is open source and can be self hosted https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
No mention of Elfeed or even Gnus?
I really hope sites continue their RSS feeds. It seems like less and less of them have them available or don’t care to keep them updated.
Some links
https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS
https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds
My problem with most RSS do not have great search. With 500+ sources this can become problem.
https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - my own project
What’s missing are the email digest services. I built a simple little service that sends rss digests to my email: https://pico.sh/feeds
Check it out
Going to shill for Feedbin (https://feedbin.com). I switched to this in 2012 when Reader blew up and it has remained a consistently excellent product since then.
I use the web client, and on iOS I use Reeder app to access Feedbin. Ben even published the a Feedbin API¹, which I wrote a Feedbin client for vintage computers (I called Mosaicbin)². I even use it for YouTube subs as of this year and it ingests them perfectly (and can filter Shorts).
I'm still on the original pricing but would happily pay $5/mo current price if it came to that. It's a product that would leave a huge void in my life if it ever disappeared.
I’m disappointed in the article but watching RSS for 25 years (declared dead for most of them) have gotten me used to disappointment. It just seems like every discussion about RSS starts as if it was some brand new thing and not if we didn’t have 25 years of experience with it.
The article makes a matrix out of the least important attributes of the product (free vs hosted) and has nothing at all to say about: (1) user interface and (2) architecture.
(2) of course puts constraints on (1) but gets you to the heart of the RSS predicament. It is possible in principle for an RSS reader to be completely stateless, that is you could make an HTML page with some JavaScript in it that reads an OPML file and then hits all those RSS feeds and formats them somehow. Or you could write some scripts that do the same with curl. [1]
The stateful system has a lot of advantages, particularly that the state never gets corrupted because it doesn’t exist. If you could add some simple and reliable layer that dealt with the worst of the polling problems with a cache then you could still stay pretty simple.
Past that though the architecture could get complex pretty quick in that you may want to reify feed items and store them in a database, keep track of whether you read something or not, run queries against the feed, run a recommender against the feed, etc.
[1] … if your cache mechanisms will protect you from polling some people’s RSS feeds too fast. Maybe you’re better off if they block you.
Happy user of Flym, a free Android reader:
If it hasn't already been mentioned huge fan of newsboat paired with Lynx in the terminal. Travels easily and with lynx browser kinda brings me back to a more focused reading experience.
Okay this is a thinly veiled ad for Lighthouse, and a clever attempt at getting backlinks, SEO value, etc.
So my real question is what is the value of Lighthouse compared to Feedly or Inoreader?
FeedFlow (all platforms and can be synced over freshRSS) https://github.com/prof18/feed-flow
Would be cool if lawnchair for android could integrate RSS as news feed..
Yes, like 95% of commenters here, I also have an RSS reader. Mine is kinda social (you can follow people and see their subscriptions in your feed), and also has full-text search and “related” recommendations. I also curate and grow a directory of human-written personal blogs: https://minifeed.net
Due to the nature of the medium, the majority of blogs in the directory and technical.
Here is my "rss reader" https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/news/
I wanted to have a list of latest posts of blogs I follow and that I can access it quickly from both PC and mobile phone without any signing in. Then I decided to do it myself like that. There is a github workflow that runs automatically every 6 hours and updates that page.
A bit of a self-promotion, but relevant. I've been working on a TUI feed reader that stores all articles locally in Markdown in a filesystem structure, similar to what Obsidian does, if anyone's interested: https://github.com/CrociDB/bulletty
I used Feeder on my Android phone for the longest time. Recently set up a NixOS server and enabled FreshRSS on it, with FocusReader as the Android client. It is very nice to manage feeds on a server and have the read/unread status sync across devices.
If you have only used device-local readers before and have a server to spare, I recommend at least trying it!
TIL everyone on HN has built an RSS reader.
I’ll add https://github.com/stringer-rss/stringer to the self-hosted list. It is my reader of choice since I think over ten years. Never had the feeling of looking for another one.
Big fan of https://github.com/synzen/MonitoRSS, not mentioned in the article. I self host at home and it sends feed updates to my own Discord server. I appreciate the customization for how the feed notification appear in Discord.
I've been a big fan of Iconfactory's Tapestry for a while now. It supports RSS, plus a bunch of custom connectors for non-RSS things. You could write your own to pull down whatever random thing you wanted, like GitHub Actions outputs or screenshots of your home webcam.
I don't know if it's permanently dead or not but I really like QuiteRSS:
https://github.com/QuiteRSS/quiterss
Last update was 4 years ago; I don't know if this means the project is dead or merely "done." One of the last features added was the ability to share a news item to Hacker News:
https://github.com/QuiteRSS/quiterss/issues/1084#issue-33248...
I have used this app on Windows and macOS; I've installed it on Linux but I don't do daily work on Linux so I don't know if it's stable there or not.
I recently enabled RSS for my own blog¹ and found it very frustrating getting the images/thumbs to display properly. The reason it was frustrating is the aggressive caching by the RSS readers. I had to debug it on a bunch of different readers, then once it was finally working change the URL of my feed to force them all to refresh.
The RSS feeds are surprisingly non-standardized for the media content extensions, even a simple thumbnail.
[1] https://www.jasonthorsness.com at https://www.jasonthorsness.com/rss.xml
Claude Code built me a custom RSS feed reader in just an hour or so. I wanted a simple list of unread posts, which would be auto-deleted when I clicked on them to read them. It took less than 24 hours to go from "ok I'll try to make this" to having it up and running "in production" on my home server.
AI could be a real game changer for anyone who runs their own server or homelab. If you can't find a reader you like, just make one! It's not that hard these days.
I've been using Feedbin basically since Google Reader died. There are many feedbin compatible clients.
I'd probably honestly like to move to something self-hosted, but afaik there is no way to export the read status of individual feed items. OPML is just a list of feeds and their URLs, not their individual item history.
I pay for both Feedly and Inoreader. I can't seem to break away from Feedly's multi-inner-tab reading features, but I like Inoreader's tagging/sorting.
I doubt this actually exists, but does anyone know of an RSS reader that is cross platform, open source, and can sync between multiple devices via syncthing?
I already sync notes, e-books, etc, via syncthing on Android and Linux. RSS is one place where I have yet to find an option.
Here is a terminal based reader that I recently created as an alternative to newsboat https://github.com/jarv/newsgoat
It has some features that I felt was missing from the terminal based readers out there already.
The author of Reeder has another RSS app that’s focused on recipes called Mela [1]. I’ve been using Reeder (the one-time payment version) and Mela for years and highly recommend both.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mela-recipe-manager/id15484660...
Article feels AI generated and misses some big ones. Given that this is advertising for their product, I don’t feel like this is actually useful (meaning unbiased and comprehensive) content for anyone who wants to figure out what RSS reader fits their needs.
No wonder they did everything they could to hide RSS from the masses: it's such a shame that users control their own feeds rather than their obscure algorithms.
I'm happy to just use Feedly.
Keeps my feeds in sync between the mobile app and the web site, has pretty good keyboard shortcuts, mostly just gets out of the way, doesn't have ads I'm not sure what else I'd need
If you are in the Apple ecosystem I recommend News Explorer. It has a very nice interface and it syncs with your iCloud. It is a one-time payment of $4.99.
Liferea looks too old, has a lot of bugs... But man that thing makes me happy, just headlines and click what I want to read.
Commafeed is also hosted at commafeed.com
When Google Reader closed I started using The Old Reader and then after 3 or 4 years jumped to Inoreader.
I've been using it since then without paying anything and it works ok.
> A deep dive
can't we just call things "A thorough examination / analysis" anymore?
If you're looking for an on-device terminal feed reader, here's mine: https://github.com/ckampfe/russ
Some folks seem to like it.
no mention of rss via email?
https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email https://pypi.org/project/rss2email/
i have been using this for 20 years already. by now my own version has accumulated a few custom patches. but the original it is still under active development/support. some day i need to submit my changes upstream.
I just made a python script that I keep running that updates when there is a new post from one of my feeds. Feed list is stored locally.
I still miss Google Reader. I loved the social aspects, where I could repost my favorite articles (with comments about them), and friends could easily subscribe to my feed and comment on my shares. It was a really great social network for sharing blog posts and articles. I credit the demise of Google Reader with a lot of the downfall of the Old Web.
Since then, social sharing platforms are motivated to keep you on their platform. I recently ran an experiment on Facebook, where I posted a link to a content creator's video on YouTube with a lot of my thoughts about it.
I then downloaded the same video from YouTube and uploaded it to Facebook (this particular creator didn't upload his content to Facebook directly), and posted the exact same text content (but this time, hid the link the the source video in a comment).
The post where I downloaded + reposted the video got about 1000x more views than the one where I linked to the source.
On top of that, Facebook will often hide the link to the source video unless I click "Show all comments" (rather than the default "Show most relevant").
Facebook deprioritizes (shadowbans?) posts that link off of their platform, and it starts feeling like a stagnant pond. It's frustrating that it's difficult to share insightful blog posts on that platform, and I'm feeling pretty done with it.
Getting a good RSS reader isn't the part that I'm looking for -- I want the easy social aspect that Google Reader and Google+ gave me.