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2022-07-18

Self Hosting Feed Reader

I installed FreshRSS last night (it wasn't entirely straightforward for someone who hasn't dealt with php installs in ages) and I gotta say it already blows Feedly out of the water.

Feedly was great when I started using it a bunch of years ago. It's been the only feed reader I've used and it really changed how I interact with a lot of websites. But feedly has constantly gotten worse over the years in an attempt to be more feature-full.

Some things that have really disturbed me include:

• It attempts to categorise individual posts with my input. For example right now the top post in my subscriptions is "As US Crypto Mining Surges, Lawmakers Demand Disclosure of Emissions and Energy Data" and as I open it the top text is the question "Is this article about Climate?" followed by a yes/no choice. Maybe good for some people, I guess. I just want to read the article.
• When I highlight a block of text a menu immediately pops up with options like "Tweet", "Search Feedly", and "Post to Wordpress". Again, maybe this helps someone but I just want to ctrl+c 🤷
• They've added some sort of virtual assistant called Leo, which can help you track trends and topics. I guess you already know what I have to say about that.

None of these are really big changes in and of themselves, but they do clutter up the interface a bit and especially the first two are truly annoying to me. What I dislike the most I guess is the general trend towards a heavier and slower website made so by features that aren't for me.

FreshRSS let's me just read my feeds. I installed it on my Raspberry Pi 2B, where I host this website and capsule along with thelounge.chat and Antenna (by far my most used service). Despite the low powered and much utilised server the FreshRSS interface is a lot faster than Feedly. And I really do mean a lot.

I'm happy so far. I'll try it out for a few days and if I still love it I'll ditch Feedly.

FreshRSS project website.

-- CC0 Björn Wärmedal