My RSS Journey
As a follow to my previous post here is an abbreviated history of my RSS usage. At least as much as I can remember.
The first time I remember using RSS was with some Firefox extension or maybe it was even built into Firefox. It was a nice little side bar that popped out and let me jump to new articles on sites I followed during college. But RSS got increasing support I moved on to webapps.
While at my first job out of college I became a pretty heavy user of Google Reader. I mainly followed blogs and other sources that wrote about things relevant to my job so I could start learning the ropes as quick as possible. The other main source I followed during this time period was the Android ecosystem. I was rooting and rom'ing all my devices during this time so keepiing up with latest patches and everything was nice. I had no complaints with Google Reader and I was sad when it was shut down but I quickly moved on to Feedly as it had a similar layout and flow with more features.
Feedly was good until they started moving features behind a paywall and pushing "recommended" articles and sources. As soon as it became clear how they were moving to monetization, I jumpedd ship. After Feedly was a period that was mainly Android apps only. I tried pretty much every one I could find. Thankfully RSS feeds are easily ported from one to the next so trying new ones was as easy as loading in the xml/opml file. Most of them worked well and were structured about the same with some features here and there. Eventually I settled on Feeder. Just the right amount of features while maintaining simplicity.
In 2024 I started trying to move to slef hosting whatever services I could. So I set up a VPS and started playing around with various services. First I tried FreshRSS as it kept coming up when I searched for "self host rss". It has a ton of great support and documentation and plugins. It also implements a few different APIs so there was no shortage of clients that could connect to it. After using it for a while I ended up switching over to Miniflux. FreshRSS was fine but Miniflux provided all of the functionality I needed in a much lighter package as far as server resources go.
During this time I caught wind of Readwise.io releasing a beta version of their Reader app. And being a sucker for beta apps and RSS apps, I tried it and fell in love with it. Along with RSS functionality it supports read-it-later saving web articles, pdfs and even epubs. I've tried to recreate the same set of functionality with other, self-hosted tools (and I can) but it requires several apps rather than just one. So that's where I'm at now. Readwise Reader. It's been great. Worth the money to me. Especially since they are a fairly small startup company and are building some great apps with straightforward monetization which is something I'm willing to support.