I see a lot of options for self-hosting RSS subscriptions and I don’t actually understand what they are for. The very nature of RSS is that it tracks and connects to online content. It seems like having a home server track and download the content just so that you can download it on another device from your server instead of the original servers a bit redundant. Also, it seems like the clients are more limited, since it has ro connect to your personal host, as opposed to the many RSS readers available.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I genuinely don’t get it. What am I missing?
I can access my RSS feeds on multiple devices without losing track of what I’ve already read.
I self-host RSSHub so my reader can pull feeds for websites that don’t provide them. I don’t host my reader, though.
Most company-owned services are 1) Tracking your behavior 2) Going to upsell you (freemium, etc.) You think Feedly is ‘free’ - not really, they are collecting your info and have a team of marketers trying to figure out how to get $$ out of you, and will slowly gate features behind the paywall.
MinifluxRSS with Nextflux frontend (browser) and Caddy for Android. You can now write .py/etc. scripts to capture your starred items to Obsidian (or favorite PKB), run AI on those to summarize, tag, and organize. I find it easier and it will never ‘shut down’ or change model.
I integrate Miniflux with readeck, which is then combined with a readeck plugin for koreader, allowing me to easily read articles on my ereader, without relying on a paid service.
I’m also one of those people that still uses custom ROMs on Android, and since the backup and restore situation is still kind of dire if you don’t use Google (and sometimes even with) it’s easier to have most of my configuration and state stored on a server, and so I can wipe a phone with relatively little risk.
I usually read my RSS feeds on my phone. That’s fine - I could do this by just subscribing to the sources directly. But every once in a while I want to look up something I read some years ago and I don’t quite remember what the article was called and where it was published. Filtering and searching on my desktop is much more convenient and I have my history saved there - even if the blog in question is offline in the meantime. In addition some RSS feeds only send a short text and a “read more” link. With FreshRSS I can configure a feed to automatically load the complete article from the website and in my reader it shows up as if the feed was a real full feed with pictures and everything. I can even compress the pictures to optimize loading as my main reader is my phone.
one Location for dozen of rss feeds instead of looking up each individual. alternative is of course setting up the feeds on the client computer, but that works only nice if you use it only from one device (e.g. read history sync).
furthermore i prefer to have such set ups on a server with backups, so if e.g. my phone gets lost i don’t need to find back all those urls.
Pretty much what others said, I host Fresh RSS.
