2022-07-30
Running FreshRSS has been a great experience. So much so that I almost forgot that I had Feedly account, despite using it for more than a decade.
I'm subscribing to more feeds now. Adding new subscriptions no longer feels like a dumb idea; reading posts on Feedly was starting to become so annoying I just didn't want more there.
Because I've locked my FreshRSS instance between HTTP Auth (it's only for me, after all) it can't do WebSub (formerly PubSubHubub). But that's okay. It just meant that the initial import from the OPML file I got from Feedly threw a few errors. It quickly adapted.
I can deeply recommend doing this. If you don't have the know how to host a service like this yourself than talk to someone who does and see if you can get an account with them. There are many many lean and mean options for self hosted feed readers and most of them support multiple users.
Despite running on weak hardware (a Raspberry Pi 2B), sharing that with many other services, and being capped at a very low memory allocation, FreshRSS really outperforms Feedly in terms of speed, especially in the web interface. Initially I had issues with PHP using up too much memory causing Apache to crash, because the default limit is 512 MB which is a shitload on a machine like the RPi 2B. I decresed the limit to 64 MB and it's been stable since without affecting the speed or usability at all. FreshRSS doesn't need much.
10/10. Much worth the effort.
-- CC0 Björn Wärmedal