this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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The problem is finding a good local, desktop based RSS reader other than thunderbird or a damn server app, especially if you're on Windows.
Btw, what is a non-local RSS reader? I have come across multiple that RSS readers that advertise being "self-hosted" and I'm confused about that since in my mind RSS readers are simply clients that periodically query different servers for an .rss file, so I'm confused about where there is anything to host besides the host of the .rss feed.
The idea is to imitate the experience of something like Feedly, an RSS feed you can access from anywhere on any device, recommendations, all that... Which is overkill if all you want is just a simple program that queries for new posts every x hours.
It’s just a web based client instead of a desktop one. And it can usually output its own RSS feed that contains your other feeds so you can hook any RSS desktop client on any device to it.
It makes more sense to have a server downloading and consolidating the data from the various sources, rather than syncing and downloading from dozens or hundreds of sources to build the feed in real time.
It's technically possible to do it all client side, but it would put more load on the RSS sources, and be a much slower user experience.
What's wrong with Thunderbird? Surely you don't use Outlook by choice?
UI is too bloated, slow, resource hungry and I've had problems with displaying some feed content in the past.
God forbid.
That's surprising. I found it be underpowered as an RSS reader, personally. Although I am really only using it for news - I know some people who use it for videos, etc.
That's one of my problems with Thunderbid, anything that isn't a HTML page just has loads of problems with it. In fact, most of the readers recommended above by other people suffer from the same problems, it kind of sucks.
What's one that doesn't suck?
Good question.
I'm yet to find something that supports notifications, handles podcasts/videos and isn't janky as all hell or hasn't been abandoned for a decade by now.
https://hyliu.me/fluent-reader/
https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard
I had been using Fluent Reader for months, suddenly the program wouldn't load up at all upon start. No visible GUI. Didn't back up my subscriptions so now I lost all my RSS links with it. :-/ Hopefully there's an update soon, or someone has a trick to retrieve my subscriptions, at least.
Feedly, Fluent Reader, NewsBlur, yarr, etc.
Thunderbird is fine, but I don't really want to interact with my feed how I interact with email.
I'm out of the loop since I've been using a self hosted Miniflux, but Raven certainly is an alternative.
It’s also been archived for a year with no revamp in sight.
Reeder on iOS and Mac is excellent. Not open source, but lovingly crafted by an indie dev.
I find the Feedbro plugin for Firefox quite handy.
It's what I've been using recently, but I really dislike how it's a browser extension, that and how it can't really handle audio files from my experience.