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Ask HN: Are you still using a feed reader?
12 points by lackita 2393 days ago
6 comments

Yes. Inoreader. Tried Feedly, but at that time Inoreader seemed to have most of the features I needed + it was really multi-platforms.

I wanted to self-host, but the time committment required for maintenance (not of the service, but with other services already running on the VPS) made me choose Inoreader.

Every now and then I look around to see if there's a new player in the feed reading game, but often stick with Ino.

Interesting. Are you looking around just to see what's out there, or are there things you don't like about Inoreader?
Yes. Self hosting tt-rss[1] and using it for close to an year now. No problem what so ever; It's so low maintenance that I would've quite possibly forgotten about it if I wasn't reading the feeds everyday. Before this I was using elfeed[2] which is a great piece of software, but I read things across various devices and elfeed had some issues with that (after all it's supposed to run inside emacs).

For podcasts (since these are also technically feeds) I use AntennaPod[3] on my Android phone, but don't use it too often because of all the time commitment required with podcasts.

[1]: https://tt-rss.org/ [2]: https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed [3]: https://antennapod.org/

That's cool. Why did you decide to use something self-hosted instead of a service like feedly?
I think it's mostly about drinking too much Kool-Aid of owning my data.

But probably because ttrss's pretty nice with quite a few plugins, so I can mold it based on what interests me. For example, I am also self hosting wallabag, and there's a single key shortcut to export the stuff from ttrss over to wallabag. Then there's a plugin to pull the data from the source websites and change it using XPaths. I use that to pull down the entire content instead of a single paragraph summaries, and to pull down the actual comics that I'm reading instead of the descriptions that are being sent to the readers. (As an aside, I donate/fund the makers in whatever capacity I have so that it compensates with me not getting their ads).

Did you know that even Youtube, HN & Reddit host their updates via RSS feeds? I have Youtube feeds for some of the channels that I find interesting, so that I can watch the stuff whenever it becomes available. For some low volume subreddits, you can use that as well.

With elfeed running in Emacs, I had bound a single key to download the youtube video via youtube-dl into my archive folder. I miss that stuff with ttrss, but I guess there would be some plugin somewhere to do that.

Oh, awesome, I didn't realize youtube still let you subscribe to an rss feed.

When I've self-hosted I've found I occasionally have to do maintenance that I find annoying. Most recently, I had a nextcloud server I needed to move to a bigger hard drive, which was a huge pain.

Have you just not run into those kinds of hurdles, or is it worth it to own your own data?

Yes. I normally don't access hn any other way. A feed reader is still the best way to handle information
I was subscribed to HN for a while, but found it was a bit overwhelming. Do you just make a point to spend some time on it, or do you have a way of cutting through the noise?
Yep, I just figured out Feedbin after all these years lol. I was using something different before that.
What do you like about Feedbin? I've never heard of that one.
I mostly like that it meets my design criterias for a web-based RSS reader. Other than that, the fact that it will let you subscribe to newsletters, and make a feed for each of them, is a cool feature.
I personally never used RSS and I think mostly because I always use Twitter.
Huh, I think I'd feel like I'm missing out on too much that way. How do you handle that blog from a random friend who never got around to creating a Twitter account? I wish I could say that's a hypothetical in my case :-)
Yes. I use newsboat.
What do you like about newsboat? This is another one I haven't heard of.