Feed readers
A standard for user-driven, open news
2016-06-29 — 2025-10-28
Wherein the decline and revival of feeds is set out, and a catalogue of feed readers, self‑hosted server options, and tools to create feeds from sites without them is presented.
Efficiently consuming and summarizing news from around the world.
Remember feeds? When we thought the internet would give us timely, pertinent information on our topics of interest? When information streams weren’t about our aunt’s conspiracy theory memes on social media but curated lists of expert opinions?
No? Did we miss that part of the internet discussion? Maybe a picture explains it better.
I’ve been told to use Twitter or Facebook for this, but… no. Those systems are designed to waste time with stupid distractions that benefit someone else. Facebook is informative in the same way thumb sucking is nourishing. Telling me to use someone’s social website to gain information is like telling me to play poker machines to fix my financial troubles. Stop that.
Instead, I want to find ways to summarize and condense information to save time for myself. That’s what feeds were designed for. New to this game? Podcasts are a type of feed — an audio feed. If I care about news articles and Tumblr posts and not just audio, I can still use feeds — feeds of text instead of audio. Any website can have a feed. Many do.
Remember when we thought the web would be a useful tool for researching and learning, and automated research assistants would trawl the web for us? RSS Feeds were often discussed as part of that machine: little updates dripped from the web to be sliced, diced, prioritized and analyzed by our software to keep us aware of… whatever.
As they stand, feeds—despite being useful and time-saving—aren’t the peak of information retrieval. AFAICT, they were always meant to be part of a larger infrastructure of automated knowledge classification and discovery and analysis, possibly involving community sharing and curating.
This higher-level analysis hasn’t happened, at least not as a technical standard. Most feed readers don’t do much fancy analysis or triage; they just give us a list of new items ordered by date. Many people make a living sifting feed wheat from feed chaff, which we call “journalism”. Services like Canopy or Pinterest or Keen that do automatic moderation can be useful, but that’s uncommon.
Still, feeds work and are much better than continually refreshing the same page.
Feeds are mourned and missing from certain modern blogs. Read Anil Dash on The lost infrastructure of social media.
Pace Anil, feeds are alive. Feeds are available for, for example, Medium, much as that site tries to distance itself from the normal web. Anil Dash’s Medium feed, for example, is https://medium.com/feed/@anildash.
In my field, feeds are more useful than ever. In academia, we are in various stages of the hype curve. Academics have belatedly caught on to feeds, which has kicked off a golden age of specialist blogs. Maybe because getting a PhD is such a giant PITA, starting a blog feels trivial by comparison, so many PhD holders produce high-quality content. I think academics are enjoying the people in the machine phase.
Want to get started? Try the sources I follow in my feed reader. They are all available on my blogroll.
Bonus reading:
- What is a feed? (a.k.a. RSS)
- Yair Rosenberg, It’s time to take back control of what we read on the internet — a beginner’s guide to feeds as a DIY internet
- See also indieweb
1 Feed discovery
- FeedLand: “The idea is to create a small creative community of people who love to share what they learn. We are not aiming to replace feed readers.”
- feedle—It’s a world of feeds!
2 Feed readers
How do we get those feeds? An app!
Either a web app, or a desktop/mobile app like the ones our granddads used to use.
2.1 Fluent Reader
Seems fine.
Fluent Reader is a local, cross-platform news aggregator with a fresh look. Bring all your favorite sources with you and read distraction-free.
2.2 Feedly
Feedly is the one I currently use. It targets commercial users — web “community managers,” marketing types, or people looking for situational awareness of security vulnerabilities. It’s mostly usable for regular people, too. This is how to subscribe to my site in Feedly.
Pros:
- excellent content-ranking algorithm
- good mobile app
- good web app
Cons:
- It’s targeted at business intelligence researchers — whatever those are — which I find irritating. The internal feedback mechanism constantly asks me whether any given article is about “leadership,” “cryptocurrency,” or “emerging threats”.
2.3 Vivaldi
Vivaldi, the browser, has a built-in feed reader. It seems fine.
Pros:
- free
- autonomous; we keep all the data
Shortcomings:
Loses folders when you import OPML(fixed in recent versions)- doesn’t automatically age out old posts
- no fancy AI relevance ranking like the fancy online ones
2.4 Fraidycat
Fraidycat is a desktop app or browser extension for Firefox or Chrome. We made it as an unapologetic passion project in an area dominated by SEO types. It has a novel UX design, created by a novel piece of the internet, Kicks Condor.
I use it to follow people (hundreds) on whatever platform they choose - Twitter, a blog, YouTube, even on a public TiddlyWiki.
Open source. Last updated: 2021.
On that UX thing,
There is no news feed. Rather than showing a massive inbox of new posts to sort through, you see a list of recently active individuals. No one can noisily take over this page, since every follow has a summary that takes up a mere two lines.
2.5 Newsblur
Newsblur is a quirky option I used for a while, until the interface started to annoy me. I can’t tell whether it’s a radical UI redesign or a poor reimplementation of the corporate-standard UI. The UI defies the last ten years’ user interface conventions, which is confusing, but it works and is cheap (and has an open-source app we can self-host). Here’s how to subscribe to my site in Newsblur
2.6 yarr
nkanaev/yarr: yet another RSS reader
yarr (yet another rss reader) is a web-based feed aggregator that can be used both as a desktop application and a personal self-hosted server.
It is written in Go with the frontend in Vue.js. The storage is backed by SQLite.
2.7 Inoreader
Inoreader seems popular amongst readers of this blog. I haven’t used it myself, but thanks for all your custom, Inoreader users. Care to tell us why you like it?
2.8 Feeder
Feeder is a browser extension/site/app for reading feeds. I haven’t used it, but it brings a lot of traffic to this blog. Feeder fans, speak up!
2.9 The Old Reader
The Old Reader reads feeds and includes activity updates for people we follow on social media. Not sure whether that’s the best or worst of all worlds. I presume the name is a tribute to its solid technology, despite the hype curve moving on to other things.
2.10 Feedbin
Feedbin is also a thing. Matt Webb recommends it because it has an easy email-to-feed gateway. USD 5/month.
2.11 Bazqux
BazQux Reader (USD 30/year) specializes in “no bullshit” branding and efficiency marketing for professional use.
2.12 Netnewswire
NetNewsWire: Free and Open Source RSS Reader for Mac and iOS
A feed reader can sync feed state via iCloud or via services such as Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader, Newsblur, The Old Reader, Bazqux, FreshRSS, and possibly other services.
Most of us can stop reading here.
3 Doing things with feeds
3.1 RSS Bridge
RSS Bridge is a utility that does lots of feed processing.
3.2 Generic web services
IFTTT, Zapier etc. can do things with feeds.
4 Plugging into the Fediverse
Very popular. Mastofeeder plugs RSS feeds into the Fediverse ecosystem.
This is a simple Mastodon/ActivityPub server that has a virtual
@website@mastofeeder.comuser for every RSS feed on the internet. Just search for your favourite RSS-enabled website from Mastodon’s search and follow the user! All RSS items will be posted as toots.
The other direction works too, apparently — see here.
4.1 Creating feeds from sites that don’t have them
Fraidycat does this for Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, SoundCloud, and Twitch. RSSbox does the same for a slightly different selection of sites.
Feedity generates feeds from sites that don’t understand content aggregators.
More generally, web scraping tools can do this. For example, Scrapy with its companion project scrapy-rss can convert weird sites into RSS.
Newsletter/RSS gateway NewsletterHunt can help. For example, here’s Matt Levin’s Money Stuff.
5 Bonus time: DIY feed reader servers
If we want something more indie or private, or we dislike pre-packaged stuff, we can run our own feed reader server. I will run my own server software if the app is compelling enough, but let’s consider the costs. Let’s say, between backups, security issues, and confusing DNS failures, it’s eight hours per year of miscellaneous computer wrangling at best, and more if we run complicated things like a multi-user, enterprisey database to store data. It’s hard to imagine that cost being worth it for internet distraction.1
- FreshRSS, a free, self-hostable feed aggregator is long-lived and popular, and requires no database. Dockerized or tarball install.
- Miniflux is open-source/DIY but also offers a hosted version for $15/year.
- Stringer looks like a nice little Ruby app but needs PostgreSQL — bloat. ⚠️
- Selfoss is a PHP/SQLite self-hosted feed reader.
- TinyTinyRSS is the original “minimalist” RSS reader; it still needs more databases than seem sensible.
- Fever is a weird commercial (USD30) application that you host on your own server. It claims to learn your information preferences, which could be cool. But I can’t be bothered installing a database-heavy app in a suspiciously antique language (PHP3) that also costs money to try, so I’ll never know.
Footnotes
Why people insist on running enterprise databases for apps like this is a mystery. The capacity to scale to many users is nice, I suppose, but by that logic, everyone should drive everywhere in a school bus.↩︎