[CarelessExpert]

Not to mention a fourth kind of person - one who just wants services that work better than what the cloud offers.

By definition, self-hosting means the service is under my control, doing what I need, customized for my use cases. And because I use only open source stacks, I can (and have) even modify the code to customize even further.

And that's ignoring the fact that free, self-hosted options can often provide features that third party services cannot for legal, technical, or supports reasons.

For example, my TT-RSS feed setup uses a scraper to pull full article content right into the feed. A service would probably land in legal trouble if they did this. And while it works incredibly well, like, 90% of the time (thank you Henry Wang, author of mercury-parser-api!), if it was a service, that 10% could result in thousands of support emails or an exodus of subscribers.

[acolumb]

Could you elaborate on how you got TTRSS to scrape?

[CarelessExpert]

I installed the Mercury parser plugin:

https://github.com/HenryQW/mercury_fulltext

The directions there are pretty clear. You've gotta set up the mercury parser API service (I used docker) and then enable the plugin for the feeds you want to apply it to.

Alternatively you could use the Readability plugin that ships with tt-rss, but I have no idea how effective it is as I never tried it.

Finally, you could stand up the RSS full text proxy:

https://github.com/Kombustor/rss-fulltext-proxy

That service standa between your RSS feed reader of choice and the RSS feed supplier and does the scraping and embedding.