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What's the ideal self hosted RSS setup?

I have used FreshRSS before but I was always annoyed that some sites don’t provide RSS feeds and that even if they provide feeds they don’t provide the whole content through it and only a preview.

What do you recommend for the perfect RSS setup? What are you using? Which app are you using to read them?

udon ,

TLDR: Just using an app on your laptop with good filters (newsbeuter!) might be all you need.

IMHO, RSS readers without decent filters are useless. If you are going to subscribe to even 10, 20 feeds, you will be flooded with articles and have no chance to go through them all. Unfortunately, that already removes 95% of readers from the options.

A long time ago, I had a TinyTinyRSS setup running. TTRSS offers amazing filters and sorting mechanisms, which made it stand out. For example, I subscribed to several dozens of job recruiting feeds and filtered out everything that didn’t match. You could also add new filters easily. So if you see many job posts for “Twist dancer” and that is not your thing, you can just filter them out and it gets better over time.

At some point though, TTRSS changed their deployment setup, I think to docker at the time, and I couldn’t be bothered reading up how to set it up back then. Something like that. I also heard that the developer is a Nazi, but this may well be wrong. Both together were somehow enough for me though to drop it and I left the RSS game for a while.

A few months ago I started again, but this time just on my laptop. Turns out, the main advantage of a server-based version is that you can read stuff on mobile, which I don’t do so much anyway. So first I tried Liferea, which kind of worked but I couldn’t wrap my head around the filter mechanism. It’s supposed to work, but I tried to figure out which part of the code in which exact format to put where exactly. Documentation and error logs suck, and after suffering for 2-3 hours I left it be. Turns out though, Liferea is mostly just a GUI for newsbeuter, and that is where I am now. The filter language is awkward, especially if you have an older version that doesn’t support pretty coding yet (I use Debian, btw). But it works and I’m happy with it now!

Other than that, although a bit beside your question: Many websites don’t bother including RSS feeds anymore these days, or even removed them to make people look at their ad infested websites. Whichever reader you pick, make sure it easily supports custom RSS feeds. I wrote a little Python script using BeautifulSoup and FeedGenerator to make my own feeds in such cases and newsbeuter can include them easily. There is also this project for that job:

git.sr.ht/~ghost08/ratt

but I didn’t look into it in detail.

Andromxda ,
@Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Keep using FreshRSS, just deploy something like fivefilters-full-text-rss-docker alongside it, to get full text RSS feeds from websites, that don’t provide them. If you don’t want to self-host, there’s morss.it. Chris Titus Tech once made a few videos about this:
invidious.fi/watch?v=nxV0CPNeFxY
invidious.fi/watch?v=Y1Ho_RrF_9I

fmstrat ,

I made Agriget back in the day, but it’s so outdated. Glad to see FreshRSS woth other clients get the most mentions over TT-RSS and all their drama, too.

FreshRSS also has extensions. Hmm, to make a Lemmy Bridge or not to make a Lemmy Bridge…

pax0707 ,
@pax0707@lemmy.world avatar

FreshRSS with Full-Text RSS behind it, when needed. Web on desktop, Lire on iOS.

lemmyvore ,

I use Flym on Android. Sadly abandoned but still working great. It can import and export OPML, has an RSS search built-in and can retrieve the full version of a piece from the original website.

TrustedTyrant ,

I use Miniflux with Reeder on my phone. It has an option to try to extract the full text from sites that only provide a summary but it can be hit or miss in my experience. For sites that don’t offer a feed I know there’s rss-bridge and rsshub, but I haven’t used either to be able to vouch for how well they work.

pukeko ,

Used to use FreshRSS. Switched to miniflux and I’m much happier now. It’s very, very simple, very clean, and does exactly what it says on the tin. You may, however, want the less opinionated experience of FreshRSS. You can always try both. (PS. I don’t typically use miniflux as my actual reader – I use reader software for that most of the time, with all my devices pulling from the same miniflux-based RSS source.)

archy ,

I use FreshRSS - really nice app, using PWA on desktop and a plain bookmark on the tablet

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Some things I’m just astonished are so popular and FreshRSS is one of those things.

conrad82 ,

I use miniflux. To read the feed I use Flux News on android. I don’t read the whole feed in the reader, but open the link

I think miniflux supports downloading the source, but I had to do it manually each time when I tried

miniflux.app

f-droid.org/packages/de.circle_dev.flux_news/

Father_Redbeard ,
@Father_Redbeard@lemmy.ml avatar

I live Miniflux but found the scraper to miss quite a few articles. Five Filters seems to work well for these cases

thegreekgeek ,
@thegreekgeek@midwest.social avatar

I use FreshRSS in a docker container both served and funneled from my tailscale network (can’t fetch feeds otherwise) and I read it on mobile with FeedMe. My main reason for using FeedMe is the customizable mobilizer though I’m pretty sure you can enable that in FreshRss as well.

rutrum ,
@rutrum@lm.paradisus.day avatar

Im using nextcloud news and the associated app. I like it because it lets me play podcasts in a player built into the android app. I havent found an up to date rss reader for freshrss that does the same (read you is beautiful, but doesnt have this feature.) And I have nextcloud already up so its easy to start with.

Theres also many plugins for freshrss, including one for rss-bridge that turns urls into rss feeds. I use this for youtube subscriptions. You could also use rss bridge independently, which is what I use for nextcloud news.

Tywele OP ,

I think I have never looked into FreshRSS plugins. I should take a look.

skittlebrau ,

When did you last use FreshRSS? It now supports creation of custom feeds using XPath scraping. ie. turn a website into a full RSS feed.

danq.me/2022/09/27/freshrss-xpath/

TreyG ,

Does this work for reddit posts too - including the comments in the feed?

skittlebrau ,

You could probably make it work, but comments could be difficult to include.

TreyG ,

Thanks for the reply. Even viewing comments you mean? I can already add posts/feeds directly to freshrss, it must doesn’t show the comments. I guess I can just update and try. I didn’t know this feature existed!

Strit ,
@Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show avatar

I use the feedreader from within Thunderbird for RSS. But I just use it to track software releases. Not articles and such.

poVoq ,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

This is quite useful to self-host: github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

I have seen this before. I have no idea what it is and there doesn’t seem to be an explanation anywhere at all.

infeeeee ,

The RSS feed for websites missing it

Thats it. First sentence on link. Generates an rss feed from a youtube channel or from a soundcloud user, etc

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Right but, why do I need to self-host this?

poVoq ,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

How else are you going to use it? Ok they have an hosted instance, but that’s not great for privacy and will break as soon as it gets somewhat popular as the sites usually have scraping protections.

infeeeee ,

You don’t have to self host it if you scroll down there is a list of public instances: rss-bridge.github.io/…/Public_Hosts.html

Reason to self host, some websites don’t like rss bridge because it’s a kind of adblock from their point of view, and they actively block the ip addresses of these instances. If you selfhost it, you can use these sites, because a single user instance won’t generate as much traffic than 1000 users, so they won’t notice your instance

pukeko ,

Ok, let’s say you selfhost RSS Bridge at myselfhost.net:1234. Let’s say you want to follow a youtube channel, @fancyyoutuber, via RSS. Plug the channel into rss-bridge, and it outputs an RSS feed at myselfhost.net:1234/feed/youtube/fancyyoutuber/atom.xml (I totally made that link up). You plug that into your RSS reader of choice as the feed source, and, boom, the youtube channel is in your reader.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

But I can do that without this software

pukeko ,

Ok. This makes it trivial to do so since youtube RSS feeds are eithet nonexistent or unreliable.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

They’re neither of those things. I use them every day already.

pukeko ,

Congrats! My native youtube RSS feeds are mostly 404 or access forbidden, depending on the day, as are many others’.

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