Ask HN: Are you still using a feed reader?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21647898

by lackita • 7 years ago

12 15 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Yes. Self hosting tt-rss[1] and using it for close to an year now. No problem what so ever; It's so low maintenance that I would've quite possibly forgotten about it if I wasn't reading the feeds everyday. Before this I was using elfeed[2] which is a great piece of software, but I read things across various devices and elfeed had some issues with that (after all it's supposed to run inside emacs).

For podcasts (since these are also technically feeds) I use AntennaPod[3] on my Android phone, but don't use it too often because of all the time commitment required with podcasts.

[1] https://tt-rss.org/ [2]: https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed [3]: https://antennapod.org/

lackita7• 7 years ago

That's cool. Why did you decide to use something self-hosted instead of a service like feedly?

tushartyagi2• 7 years ago

I think it's mostly about drinking too much Kool-Aid of owning my data.

But probably because ttrss's pretty nice with quite a few plugins, so I can mold it based on what interests me. For example, I am also self hosting wallabag, and there's a single key shortcut to export the stuff from ttrss over to wallabag. Then there's a plugin to pull the data from the source websites and change it using XPaths. I use that to pull down the entire content instead of a single paragraph summaries, and to pull down the actual comics that I'm reading instead of the descriptions that are being sent to the readers. (As an aside, I donate/fund the makers in whatever capacity I have so that it compensates with me not getting their ads).

Did you know that even Youtube, HN & Reddit host their updates via RSS feeds? I have Youtube feeds for some of the channels that I find interesting, so that I can watch the stuff whenever it becomes available. For some low volume subreddits, you can use that as well.

With elfeed running in Emacs, I had bound a single key to download the youtube video via youtube-dl into my archive folder. I miss that stuff with ttrss, but I guess there would be some plugin somewhere to do that.

digital_voodoo• 7 years ago

Yes. Inoreader. Tried Feedly, but at that time Inoreader seemed to have most of the features I needed + it was really multi-platforms.

I wanted to self-host, but the time committment required for maintenance (not of the service, but with other services already running on the VPS) made me choose Inoreader.

Every now and then I look around to see if there's a new player in the feed reading game, but often stick with Ino.

lackita7• 7 years ago

Interesting. Are you looking around just to see what's out there, or are there things you don't like about Inoreader?

anthony_gl• 7 years ago

I personally never used RSS and I think mostly because I always use Twitter.

lackita7• 7 years ago

Huh, I think I'd feel like I'm missing out on too much that way. How do you handle that blog from a random friend who never got around to creating a Twitter account? I wish I could say that's a hypothetical in my case :-)

catacombs• 7 years ago

Yes. I use newsboat.

lackita7• 7 years ago

What do you like about newsboat? This is another one I haven't heard of.

hopesthoughts2• 7 years ago

Yep, I just figured out Feedbin after all these years lol. I was using something different before that.

lackita7• 7 years ago

What do you like about Feedbin? I've never heard of that one.

hopesthoughts2• 7 years ago

I mostly like that it meets my design criterias for a web-based RSS reader. Other than that, the fact that it will let you subscribe to newsletters, and make a feed for each of them, is a cool feature.

tomjen3• 7 years ago

Yes. I normally don't access hn any other way. A feed reader is still the best way to handle information

lackita7• 7 years ago

I was subscribed to HN for a while, but found it was a bit overwhelming. Do you just make a point to spend some time on it, or do you have a way of cutting through the noise?

Ask HN: Are you still using a feed reader?

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