So, mostly for historical reasons I follow quite a lot of blogs and webcomics, with wildly varying update schedules, and the times where I am willing to just middle-click on a folder and check everything by hand are long gone.
Dedicated rss-readers, as in “programs you run on your computer”, have the inherent disadvantage of being device-bound, which sucks between two computers, a smartphone, and a work laptop.
For a long time, my preferred solution to that was feedly, where you can make an account and collect your feeds and then access them from whereever. feedly is free with paid options (that I never used) and has been offering hallucination machine “support” lately, which (next to “you are probably the product”) was the main reason to look for alternatives.
Enter FreshRSS.
FreshRSS is a web-based feed aggregator that is also open source and self-hostable, and especially the latter made it interesting.
I first tried for a while to run it as a docker package on my NAS, which technically worked but access from the outside was notoriously wonky. I don’t know why, as Jellyfin (media server, more on that another time), never had any problems with a similar reverse proxy configuration. Whatever the reason was, it was not a workable solution.
And then I stumbled across a tutorial on how to install and run it with my webspace-provider. I had thought that impossible, as it’s “only” webspace and not a proper server 1the difference being that a server can run programs like a normal computer, while webspace is more a glorified storage space, but it turns out that the capability to run cronjobs is all that’s needed.
A bit of copying and pasting later, the setup of said cronjob, and the import of the OPML-export out of feedly, the picture above presented itself: a good full set of nearly all my feeds. Some of them turned out to be obsolete by now (feedly just doesn’t complain), and some seem to have trouble acting on the seemingly valid feeds provided by the websites, but that’s something to sort out later. Also, nothing of actual importance was impacted by that.
So far, everything seems to working fine, and while I will keep feedly as a reference for a few more days I think I’ll shutter that one for good in the near future.
FreshRSS also offers a ton of configuration options I’ll likely never look at, and a bunch of skins I probably will look at. Their website also links a few places where you could sign-up for a free account hosted by someone else, which in my case was very much not what I wanted but might be an option for you, and also a demo instance to look at what you will get into.
There’s also the possibility to connect to a variety of mobile apps, which is not super important for me but it’s nice to have the option.
Is “I’ll host it myself” an option for everypony? Surely no. But if it is for you, then this seems to be a solid and easily manageable alternative for a portable RSS reader.