I've tried to switch from Feedly to a self-hosted solution last month, and tested some of the different open-source options.
Different UIs aside, one of the issues I kept having was that some of my feeds wouldn't load because sites now have a bot/scrapping/AI protection in place (Cloudflare, Anubis, etc), breaking RSS readers. And that was with a residential IP, it was even worse if I routed traffic via a popular VPS or VPN provider.
I guess this will affect some users more than others depending on what we subscribe to, but I decided to keep using Feedly (for now at least).
Thank you for this post. I was debating about moving from Feedly and this just saved me a lot of headaches.
At this point the main reason I stay on Feedly is their ability to handle fake email subscriptions into their RSS format. So many blogs and other places don't provide RSS anymore :(
I'd still give it a try if you have the time. You can easily run some of the alternatives with docker containers and from there you just need to import your OPML from Feedly. You don't have to switch, but it may work better for you than it did for me (it clearly works well enough for some) and you'd have an idea of the different UIs and approaches.
I only use real RSS feeds, so I'm not sure if there's an open source alternative that can replace Feedly for sites that don't have a feed.
For small blogs, especially those I sometimes find here on HN, usually they'll add a feed if you ask them. Sometimes it's just something they forgot to enable in their site generator or maybe they already have a feed, but it's a weird URL and it's not declared in the HTML. In my case it helps that the small blogs I follow are often from people that avoid social media, like to host their stuff, etc, and see the benefits of following sites via feeds.
I tried going back to Thunderbird for RSS recently just to get away from bloated web readers. The fact that you can use standard email rules to filter out high-volume noise is actually amazing. You can just auto-archive posts based on regex or keywords.
But the lack of simple cross-device sync killed the experiment for me. If you read a few articles on your phone while commuting, your desktop client has no idea when you get home. It is a great setup if you only ever consume news at one desk, but I ended up just sticking with Miniflux so my unread counts stay sane.
> But the lack of simple cross-device sync killed the experiment for me. If you read a few articles on your phone while commuting, your desktop client has no idea when you get home.
There is an open source service named gpodder.net (web app, not the client app) that does this for podcasts. It doesn't just sync post read status, it can also sync added podcast feeds across supported clients on all devices.
Since podcasts are based on RSS feeds, this shows that what you seek is possible with regular feeds too. I don't know yet how gpodder does it, but that should be easy enough to find out because the web app seems to have good documentation in addition to being open source.
However, looking at the RSS and Atom feed formats, they seem to include some variation of a uuid per story. This is like message-ids in emails and should be useful in cross-device post status sync. This could be what gpodder uses for sync. A similar service for regular feeds would be easy enough to make. But it would need support across feed readers too, like how several podcast clients support gpodder.
> It is a great setup if you only ever consume news at one desk, but I ended up just sticking with Miniflux so my unread counts stay sane.
I'm considering deploying an aggregator too. So I'm curious. What made you settle with miniflux?
I like Miniflux becuase it is easy to run and keeps a centralized status if you have multiple devices. I guess if Thunderbird supported the Fever protocol you could use them together unless there is some other method I'm not aware of?
I've wanted to try Miniflux for a long time, so a few weeks ago I set it up on a headless debian box I have running for some homelab services. That's part of my Tailscale network, so I was able to immediately start testing on desktop, phone, etc. It's great!
I might take a stab at customizing the UI a bit. I like that it's opinionated but pretty bare-bones visually out of the box.
Yes, the web UI is not great but there is a nice iOS app called Reeder, and some desktop clients too. I'd love to use Thunderbird as the desktop client.
That might have been Thunderbird doing its initial indexing of your existing messages. It's the first thing I disable after installing Thunderbird: go to Settings > General > Indexing (at the bottom of the page) and uncheck the setting for "Enable Global Search and Indexer." I always found it extremely slow and CPU intensive, and just not worth it, especially when you have IMAP server-side search.
> Thunderbird delivers RSS feed items the same way as email, so you can apply filters to mark them as "read"
This is a good idea. I use Thunderbird only for a small number of feeds I want to read every post from. I used to also use a separate feed reader for my "river of news", but eventually I stopped looking at that and just loadded hackernews or reddit when I wanted a distraction. But I might try Thunderbird for more feeds and just auto-mark most of them as read so I can browse at my leisure.
This may be a good alternative to the various web-based services, which suffer from various limitations (cost money, display ads, limited number of feeds, limited retention, annoying features you don't want, etc). The email-style user interface is also familiar, and you can set up filters to ignore or star certain stories.
Assuming you don't need syncing across devices, the main drawback to self-hosting is that it only receives updates while your PC is switched on. Some feeds update often enough that you'll miss stories if you don't grab them multiple times per day.
Yes I have been doing this for years. I also have my gmail account plumbed in so I have a local copy of my emails; easy archiving. And yes I manually copy my opml changes across devices and I like it!
Doesn't opera/vivaldi also have built-in rss client, bit torrent client, e-mail client and irc client? Seems like a better way to have everting of this kind in one place. I wouldn't want to mix my emails with rss, that makes little sense to me.
I use Thunderbird to consume the changelog of my very own software. I can confirm, it works great! I get always notified accurately when something changed I changed.
I can confirm the TT-RSS app (found on F-Droid) is very good. I have used it for years. On the other hand, the web app is not very good, and each time I wanted to read articles on my computer from the web interface, I encountered huge issues (for some reason, the "right click / mark as read" never correctly worked on my computers, or at least with huge lags of several seconds). When my free TT-RSS provider closed, I decided to switch to FreshRSS and could compare several apps for Android; I finally set up the following workflow: free FreshRSS account + "Read You" (found on F-Droid also), and managed to achieve a very similar workflow than previously (with a much better web app).
The built-in matrix and irc client is pretty great too, hope they can keep building out these features. I donate every year to projects I use, and TB was among them this year.
The issue I have with Thunderbird and RSS is that there's no good way to do a show me the unread only and keep the feed folders. You can do a search folder or show unread folders but that affects mail too.
> and it’s honestly quite great. As opposed to it not honestly being great, which if true, would kind of defeat the point of writing this post
Well I, for one, find the honesty refreshing.
Someone else mentioned Miniflux, which I've been testing for a few weeks on a local, tailscale-connected debian box. I really like it so far, with only a few minor complaints. It seems to embrace Dave Winer’s "river of news" idea that the author mentions. When I open my Miniflux homepage, I see the latest posts and I'm not distracted by older posts that I might not be concerned about.
That said, I categorize my feeds and treat the categories differently. Dev/design/DIY -- I tend to read all/most of it.
Both of these comments are needlessly snarky. Although it is true that the RSS capability of Thunderbird has been around for quite a while, I enjoy articles that simply reflect the author's discovery or use case.
Like you, I was consuming RSS through Thunderbird around that time as well and thought it was really good. I have since moved to something else(many times) as my needs have changed.
In the spirit of HN, the poster maybe wanted a discussion of how the use of RSS has declined and walled gardens took its place which is not good for the longevity and usefulness of knowledge.
I've tried to switch from Feedly to a self-hosted solution last month, and tested some of the different open-source options.
Different UIs aside, one of the issues I kept having was that some of my feeds wouldn't load because sites now have a bot/scrapping/AI protection in place (Cloudflare, Anubis, etc), breaking RSS readers. And that was with a residential IP, it was even worse if I routed traffic via a popular VPS or VPN provider.
I guess this will affect some users more than others depending on what we subscribe to, but I decided to keep using Feedly (for now at least).
Thank you for this post. I was debating about moving from Feedly and this just saved me a lot of headaches.
At this point the main reason I stay on Feedly is their ability to handle fake email subscriptions into their RSS format. So many blogs and other places don't provide RSS anymore :(
I'd still give it a try if you have the time. You can easily run some of the alternatives with docker containers and from there you just need to import your OPML from Feedly. You don't have to switch, but it may work better for you than it did for me (it clearly works well enough for some) and you'd have an idea of the different UIs and approaches.
I only use real RSS feeds, so I'm not sure if there's an open source alternative that can replace Feedly for sites that don't have a feed.
For small blogs, especially those I sometimes find here on HN, usually they'll add a feed if you ask them. Sometimes it's just something they forgot to enable in their site generator or maybe they already have a feed, but it's a weird URL and it's not declared in the HTML. In my case it helps that the small blogs I follow are often from people that avoid social media, like to host their stuff, etc, and see the benefits of following sites via feeds.
I tried going back to Thunderbird for RSS recently just to get away from bloated web readers. The fact that you can use standard email rules to filter out high-volume noise is actually amazing. You can just auto-archive posts based on regex or keywords.
But the lack of simple cross-device sync killed the experiment for me. If you read a few articles on your phone while commuting, your desktop client has no idea when you get home. It is a great setup if you only ever consume news at one desk, but I ended up just sticking with Miniflux so my unread counts stay sane.
> But the lack of simple cross-device sync killed the experiment for me. If you read a few articles on your phone while commuting, your desktop client has no idea when you get home.
There is an open source service named gpodder.net (web app, not the client app) that does this for podcasts. It doesn't just sync post read status, it can also sync added podcast feeds across supported clients on all devices.
Since podcasts are based on RSS feeds, this shows that what you seek is possible with regular feeds too. I don't know yet how gpodder does it, but that should be easy enough to find out because the web app seems to have good documentation in addition to being open source.
However, looking at the RSS and Atom feed formats, they seem to include some variation of a uuid per story. This is like message-ids in emails and should be useful in cross-device post status sync. This could be what gpodder uses for sync. A similar service for regular feeds would be easy enough to make. But it would need support across feed readers too, like how several podcast clients support gpodder.
> It is a great setup if you only ever consume news at one desk, but I ended up just sticking with Miniflux so my unread counts stay sane.
I'm considering deploying an aggregator too. So I'm curious. What made you settle with miniflux?
Thunderbird is basically a web reader already though right? Its based on HTML and JS mostly.
I like Miniflux becuase it is easy to run and keeps a centralized status if you have multiple devices. I guess if Thunderbird supported the Fever protocol you could use them together unless there is some other method I'm not aware of?
I've wanted to try Miniflux for a long time, so a few weeks ago I set it up on a headless debian box I have running for some homelab services. That's part of my Tailscale network, so I was able to immediately start testing on desktop, phone, etc. It's great!
I might take a stab at customizing the UI a bit. I like that it's opinionated but pretty bare-bones visually out of the box.
Yes, the web UI is not great but there is a nice iOS app called Reeder, and some desktop clients too. I'd love to use Thunderbird as the desktop client.
I installed Thunderbird for the first time today, and removed it about an hour later. It sat there idle chewing up 67% of a CPU core.
That might have been Thunderbird doing its initial indexing of your existing messages. It's the first thing I disable after installing Thunderbird: go to Settings > General > Indexing (at the bottom of the page) and uncheck the setting for "Enable Global Search and Indexer." I always found it extremely slow and CPU intensive, and just not worth it, especially when you have IMAP server-side search.
> Thunderbird delivers RSS feed items the same way as email, so you can apply filters to mark them as "read"
This is a good idea. I use Thunderbird only for a small number of feeds I want to read every post from. I used to also use a separate feed reader for my "river of news", but eventually I stopped looking at that and just loadded hackernews or reddit when I wanted a distraction. But I might try Thunderbird for more feeds and just auto-mark most of them as read so I can browse at my leisure.
This may be a good alternative to the various web-based services, which suffer from various limitations (cost money, display ads, limited number of feeds, limited retention, annoying features you don't want, etc). The email-style user interface is also familiar, and you can set up filters to ignore or star certain stories.
Assuming you don't need syncing across devices, the main drawback to self-hosting is that it only receives updates while your PC is switched on. Some feeds update often enough that you'll miss stories if you don't grab them multiple times per day.
Yes I have been doing this for years. I also have my gmail account plumbed in so I have a local copy of my emails; easy archiving. And yes I manually copy my opml changes across devices and I like it!
Doesn't opera/vivaldi also have built-in rss client, bit torrent client, e-mail client and irc client? Seems like a better way to have everting of this kind in one place. I wouldn't want to mix my emails with rss, that makes little sense to me.
I built an RSS reader and just launched the beta: https://aggly.com Interested in any feedback.
I use Thunderbird to consume the changelog of my very own software. I can confirm, it works great! I get always notified accurately when something changed I changed.
I still perfer the TT-RSS, now on github without Fox (The dev most people had issues with).
The android app isn't maintained at the moment but it's still one of the best rss apps I have ever used
I can confirm the TT-RSS app (found on F-Droid) is very good. I have used it for years. On the other hand, the web app is not very good, and each time I wanted to read articles on my computer from the web interface, I encountered huge issues (for some reason, the "right click / mark as read" never correctly worked on my computers, or at least with huge lags of several seconds). When my free TT-RSS provider closed, I decided to switch to FreshRSS and could compare several apps for Android; I finally set up the following workflow: free FreshRSS account + "Read You" (found on F-Droid also), and managed to achieve a very similar workflow than previously (with a much better web app).
The built-in matrix and irc client is pretty great too, hope they can keep building out these features. I donate every year to projects I use, and TB was among them this year.
This comment and OP's feed reader suggestion are making me look into Thunderbird for the first time in 17-ish years!
The issue I have with Thunderbird and RSS is that there's no good way to do a show me the unread only and keep the feed folders. You can do a search folder or show unread folders but that affects mail too.
Or I don't know how
> and it’s honestly quite great. As opposed to it not honestly being great, which if true, would kind of defeat the point of writing this post
Well I, for one, find the honesty refreshing.
Someone else mentioned Miniflux, which I've been testing for a few weeks on a local, tailscale-connected debian box. I really like it so far, with only a few minor complaints. It seems to embrace Dave Winer’s "river of news" idea that the author mentions. When I open my Miniflux homepage, I see the latest posts and I'm not distracted by older posts that I might not be concerned about.
That said, I categorize my feeds and treat the categories differently. Dev/design/DIY -- I tend to read all/most of it.
Man discovers long-available UI in common app, which he has not noticed before! News at 11!
Pretty sure I was using TB to read RSS back in 2006 or something like that...
Both of these comments are needlessly snarky. Although it is true that the RSS capability of Thunderbird has been around for quite a while, I enjoy articles that simply reflect the author's discovery or use case.
Like you, I was consuming RSS through Thunderbird around that time as well and thought it was really good. I have since moved to something else(many times) as my needs have changed.
In the spirit of HN, the poster maybe wanted a discussion of how the use of RSS has declined and walled gardens took its place which is not good for the longevity and usefulness of knowledge.