RSS is not lifeless. I simply took it again

Name me old school, however I’m nonetheless a fan of RSS feeds relating to staying present with the tech beats I cowl. Sure, I do have a curated listing of subreddits that I ceaselessly browse, however for me, nothing beats RSS for holding tabs on the competitors or catching offbeat tales from information sources I respect. 

And I simply acquired my RSS feeds again, for good. 

Let’s again up for a second. If you happen to’ve by no means heard of RSS (brief for Actually Easy Syndication), you’re not alone. It peaked in reputation round 2010 however is comparatively area of interest right this moment. RSS is an open net customary that lets web sites publish standardized feeds of their content material, which you’ll be able to subscribe to utilizing an RSS reader.

Some RSS readers are constructed into net browsers, others are cell apps, and nonetheless others are on the internet itself. The most well-liked of all was Google Reader, which Google heartlessly killed off (sure, I’m nonetheless sore about it) again on July 1, 2013. 

Useless easy to make use of and providing a clear, intuitive UI, Google Reader allowed you to type your feeds and arrange them into folders—and, after all, it was free. The Google Reader API grew to become the de facto customary for the preferred cell RSS readers, so when Google killed off Reader, it scrambled the RSS reader ecosystem, with dozens of different providers speeding to fill the gaping gap (which, in a broader sense, was finally crammed by Fb, Twitter, Reddit, and the like). 

To be truthful, there have been—and nonetheless are—loads of different good RSS readers on the market. You possibly can nonetheless subscribe to RSS feeds utilizing browsers like Chrome and (as a colleague of mine really useful) Vivaldi, there are desktop and cell apps like Reeder, NetNewsWire, and QuiteRSS, and there are web-hosted providers like Inoreader, NewsBlur, and—greatest of all—Feedly. 

Feedly’s web-based reader hosted my RSS feeds for greater than 10 years, and it affords a glossy interface (I fairly like its cards-style design for particular person tales) and straightforward feed discovery and administration. However Feedly has been pushing paid options like article search and Leo, its AI assistant, whereas squeezing advertisements into my feeds and capping free utilization. In different phrases, it’s the usual “freemium” playbook, and Feedly isn’t alone in following it.  

Lastly, I’d had sufficient. I wished my RSS feeds again. I’d caught with Feedly for therefore lengthy as a result of I didn’t love the options—however even when I did change, I may nonetheless wind up again in the identical boat, coping with freemium function creep or questioning if the service would up and give up on me, identical to Google Reader did. 

That’s why I lastly made the leap and started internet hosting my very own RSS reader—one with simply the options I would like, and one which I can rely on to stick round, as a result of I’m operating it alone machine. 

I wound up going with FreshRSS, a free and open-source RSS reader that’s appropriate with Home windows and Linux. I selected to put in FreshRSS on certainly one of my Raspberry Pi 5 machines (with a good quantity of Gemini and Google Antigravity help, to make sure). It’s good for holding my FreshRSS occasion operating 24/7.  

FreshRSS affords the identical bread-and-butter performance as Feedly, together with the flexibility so as to add and arrange your RSS feeds, organize them in folders, learn articles in a “card” view, and so forth. However whereas FreshRSS’s interface isn’t as slick as Feedly’s, it additionally jettisons the advertisements and the feed restrictions, which means you possibly can add as many feeds as your native machine can stand and tuck them into as many folders as you see match. 

FreshRSS additionally helps the favored Google Reader API, which means I can faucet into my FreshRSS-curated feeds with the Reeder app for iOS. There may be additionally a small however rising catalog of extensions that do issues like estimate the studying time of an article, add buttons for “read-later” providers like Wallabag (one other terrific self-hosted app), and even summarize and/or auto-tag articles with the AI mannequin of your selecting. 

I ought to word that there are different free and open-source RSS readers that may provide help to reclaim your RSS feeds: Tiny Tiny RSS is a well-liked one, as is Miniflux (which is free to self-host but additionally affords a paid cloud model). I went with FreshRSS as a result of it’s well-liked and ceaselessly up to date, however I’ve heard good issues about Tiny Tiny RSS and Miniflux, too. 

What all three have in widespread is that they’ll get you your treasured RSS feeds again—and for me, that’s priceless.