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by trekz 684 days ago
Not surprised to see Reeder in there. It’s a great app for Apple users. But that app can bring a website to its knees with how aggressive it is.

I can see in my logs that it constantly makes over ~20 requests to different RSS feeds on my domain, all in the exact same millisecond. Happens multiple times a day. And it appears to rotate IPs. Scary… Tried reaching out to the developer about it twice, but they never responded.

2 comments

> Not surprised to see Reeder in there. It’s a great app for Apple users.

I agree. Until you find a bug or have a feature request.

> Tried reaching out to the developer about it twice, but they never responded.

And this is exactly why. The developer is the most unresponsive I’ve ever seen. I don’t know why they bother with a “Support / Feedback / Contact” form on the website. And it’s not just you or me, I’ve seen the same commentary from other people.

So if you want to use the app, you better like it as it is. Especially since the developer is working on something else which overlaps in functionality, so I doubt Reeder will get much love going forward. It’s a shame, because it’s the best feed reader I’ve tried, and its small annoyances could be easily solved.

It also queries from external servers? I was under the impression it’s all from the IP of the users themselves. I have Reeder on iOS, and all the feed storage set to iCloud, and afaik whenever I open the app and it’s syncing, I imagine it’s going via whatever network I’m currently connected to.
That's probably Apple's Private Relay feature
iCloud Private Relay only affects Safari.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602

That's not what it says on that article. According to their PDF, Private Relay also covers apps:

https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/iCloud_Private_Relay_Over...

> That's not what it says on that article.

I don’t see any mention of anything else but Safari on the page.

> According to their PDF, Private Relay also covers apps

Only if the app’s traffic is unencrypted, which is a an important caveat. In practice, I doubt that affects many.

Still, thank you for the correction. I was under the impression there was another small case in addition to Safari but wasn’t finding it so thought I misremembered.

And it is relevant in this case since it is plausible someone added a non-HTTPS feed URL as a feed and never updated it.