I second that recommendation, adding only that I also use TheOldReader and it all works pretty well together. I've never tried it with any other kind of sync backend, but I'd like to.
If anyone has any suggestions for a FOSS selfhosted sync backend, I'd appreciate them.
Yea, this also baffles my mind. It's probably the first thing I look for before even thinking of downloading something. Google images only has screenshots of very old versions it seems.
Lack of screenshots usually indicates to me that the interface is probably not worth showing.
I've only had it a week or so and it seems pretty good, you can arrange things in folders and it has smart folders to, which create dynamic lists using criteria - haven't looked at them yet - they're not something I need. It hasn't crashed yet and seems to just work.
I am huge fan of Vienna on macOS. Currently I have my ~/Library/Application Support/Vienna symlinked to Dropbox in order to have my feeds synced across computers. I wish there was a better, more robust way.
It's web based not a desktop app but after Google Reader went down I somehow ended up with Newsblur and it's actually pretty good. The iOS and Android app is also nice.
I wonder what exactly the author misses in Reeder. I've been using it for years, and did not even notice that it wasn't being updated.
I have feeds. They have posts. I read (some). The end.
There's nothing I'm missing, nothing that's broken. Complaining just about missing updates probably explains why the author never got to read anything: he was too busy fiddling with the reading experience.
I don't miss anything from Reeder, I use it on iOS already and it's all great. I also don't really have a problem with spending the money for Reeder. I'm just worried that in a few months when Mojave comes out all kinds of things are going to break and I have to look for a new solution.
That's great. Will it get updated to the new dark mode, will it get fixed if the new beta version breaks it? I was just trying to get a sign of life from the developer / developers. As someone else already said it has a history of activity and being abandoned for long stretches of time.
>I was just trying to get a sign of life from the developer / developers
This seems a little weird, no? Reeder's a one time purchase, not a subscription service or anything, so it seems kinda strange to be so worried about "a sign of life" for it. Lots of software used every day live in "maintenance only" or even "not maintained mode".
I'm not demanding an SLA or monthly updates. It's the same as with pulling a dependency into your projects, you are checking if the author is still around, the issues are being worked on and if other people are using it too.
This is one advantage Windows has over Mac. A straightforward windows app that worked fine in say 2004 on will still work fine in 2018. They don't break the damn system every year.
I use https://newsblur.com — it’s a web interface and service with apps available for iOS and Android.
The code is open source and actively developed, which gives me peace of mind when I pay my yearly subscription.
On my Mac I tried liking Reeder 3, but TBH NewsBlur’s web interface is better. Reeder can use NewsBlur’s API and the syncing between mobile and desktop is nice to have.
NewsBlur’s author has been very responsive to issues and has been actively improving the service.
I also tried self-hosting various web solutions but it’s too much of a hassle, a constant security risk and paying for a VPS ends up being more expensive.
For me, it's that I use a variety of systems and operating systems depending upon the circumstances. Unless it's relatively specialized tools (development environment, heavy-duty photo editing), I'd much rather have a web interface I can get to from anywhere rather than having a native app I can only use on one system. The native app has to be a lot better at some task.
If you run a cron job that turns your feed items into emails[1], you can use your regular IMAP client on any platform. I prefer it over both web clients and native feed readers.
[1] There are a bunch of tools that can do this, but I'm going to give a totally unbiased recommendation for https://github.com/zsau/feedmail/
I've been using the free version of NewsBluer and the paid versions of Reeder3 on OSX and iOS for over a year now and I'm really with it (no affiliation with either). For an one-off payment of 18$ (for the Reeder apps) I think its pretty great.
The free NewsBlur does remove unread items older than 7 days or so I believe but the paid version raises that up to a month or so.
Through the combination I get a very good sync of my read, and starred items and Reeder 3 offers some nifty integrations with services like Pinboard and a decent built-in browser and a 'text only' version of the website which makes it easier to read in a small screen.
It's crashing a lot for me lately, to the tune of every 100 articles, or sometimes when you go in/out the web view too fast. Mind you, I'm not a power user at all, just a regular feed consumer.
This happened a lot on High Sierra, and the Mojave beta has made it much worse (although that is to be expected).
Ditto, though I open it maybe 3-5 times in a day and rarely have more than 50 or so articles queued up. Also, I open links in Safari instead of the built in web view on both Mac and iOS.
Reeder crashes for me if I leave it open all of the time, usually sometime between the 24-48 hour mark. But if I'm just opening it, reading, and then closing, it seems to be fine.
Same here. It seems to check all the authors needs, other than being constantly updated.... But then, if it's not broke, not sure what need there is to keep pushing updates?
Reeder is the best right now, but author disappears for a long stretch of time without updates, then large release, few bug-fix releases and then again quiet time. Despite the fact he promised more frequent updates recently — he's been silent for a long time to think Reeder is dead. It's been crashing a lot lately, so not sure what to expect.
It’s an RSS reader. I don’t expect anything but bug fixes, because I’m not sure there are any new features I’d care about. Reeder does it’s job and does it well.
My only complaint would be I’d prefer to use the native share sheet, not have to go through the Reeder one to get to the native one. But that’s not a huge problem. And I think Reeder may predate useful share sheets in iOS.
I use Reeder for Mac (and iOS) with Feedly and while I understand the author's reluctance to buy, I haven't had any real problems with the apps in all my years of usage. Although I must say I recently contacted the author with a tiny feature request and didn't hear back from them either.
RSS is just a niche product, bring it up with your average user and they probably won't know what you're talking about. I'm just glad these apps are still around. Maybe we'll once get a resurgence like Podcasts.
Reeder works well enough; just because an app hasn't been updated in a year doesn't mean it's not worth paying for and using. The author's "hey I used this for a long time and stopped when it became paid can you promise me updates" letter is obnoxious.
The one thing I wish it had was a webview that would honor my content blockers; I think it's still using an outdated webview API on macOS.
Obnoxious letter author here, just to clarify: I'm not stingy and I bought all versions of Reeder on iOS and two versions for macOS. It's not about the 10 bucks, I just don't want to find a new solution / problem every time it goes through stretches of no activity for years, breaks on new OS versions or crashes frequently like some people here reported too.
If there's an app with subscription pricing where I know it's a sustainable app for the developer and it'll get adapted to support new macOS features (or updated APIs like you said) then I'm happy to do that. I don't need updates every month, I just want to know that if there's a problem the developer will deal with it at some point.
As someone who next to a Mac also uses Windows I just gave up on native RSS apps. Somehow RSS (or Twitter) apps never got traction on Windows.
There are some nice self-hosted RSS aggregators but in the end I just 'solved' this problem by subscribing to Inoreader. Its web app is convenient, resource-friendly and has more features than I will ever need. Their Android app also looks very polished. It is reliable to fetch article contents for header only feeds and because most RSS feeds are just pointers to web content I am just fine with not having a native app on my Mac/PC.
Brent Simmons working on new open-source[1] rss reader for macOS — Evergreen[2]. Brent is original author of NetNewsWire. He recently posted screenshot[3] of current Evergreen state.
I hate to say it because people seem to have some weird affinity for Pasco in the Mac community, but Black Pixel is where good apps go to die. They bought up Kaleidoscope and have effectively stopped all development on it (a paid diff viewer that still has no syntax highlighting).
Why does that app even exist? All its features are natively implemented in git.
And an RSS reader? I'm starting to get the feeling that Mac apps are stuck in 2005.
Say all you want about Microsoft or Electron, but VS Code is the only developer app on my computer that doesn't feel out of place or have a strange and outdated UI. I don't care that it's consuming the resources of my cheap desktop computer slightly faster than another app might, it gets the job done and it's intuitive and works well.
Kaleidoscope has a bunch of great features, like diffing images and easily resolving merge conflicts with a few clicks. It also integrates into other git GUI tools like Tower for Mac. Of course if you live in the Terminal it's probably not very tempting to use. It's a matter of personal preference.
I still use it from time to time even though I know that it's probably at the end of it's life.
I use kaleidoscope with the git cli. I like using git from the command line, except for dealing with merge conflicts, so I have kaleidoscope pick up merges through its mergetool hook.
> only developer app on my computer that doesn't feel out of place
VS Code feels nothing like any other app on my Mac.
The window chrome doesn't look like a Mac app. Resizing a window resizes like an app from the 90s (content doesn't layout until the resize finishes, only the window border resizes live). The scroll bars aren't consistent with any other app, neither are the tabs. Scrolling content doesn't overscroll and rubberband like other scroll views.
You might personally prefer the UI in VS Code, but it is the poster child for "strange UI" on that platform.
I've started using NetNewsWire on the Mac in...2005? Earlier? They can pry RSS from my dead cold hands.
I wish ReadKit didn't seem abandoned. Great keyboard shortcuts, Pocket integration, and no attempts to algorithmically sort items. I wonder if this is another app that got hurt by the lack of upgrade pricing in the Mac App Store. I'd pay again if I could.
Tangentially, I'm looking for a good RSS reader for iOS (preferably free and well designed, but paid ones are ok too).
I used to use Pulse, but it was bought by LinkedIn and completely messed up after that. Then I switched to using Apple News to follow some sites. But News is not a proper RSS reader as such, and Apple has done little to improve it since it was released with iOS 9 — still supported and available only in a few countries, cannot add RSS feeds, cannot find certain sites through a search, and very weird bugs if one switches the region setting. It's basically abandonware, as far as feature richness and expansion are concerned. Three years on, I still don't understand why the app cannot be available worldwide and work as a feed reader too.
I've tried Flipboard, but I don't like the fancy magazine-like layout and navigation (which I find unintuitive).
Never really liked RSS on the mac, used Google Reader, then switched to Feedly but wanted a little bit more, so i built https://aktu.io, a RSS reader + news aggregator, kind of a mix between Google Reader and Google News.
I don't use swiper, but Emacs + Elfeed is indeed a great experience; especially so if you tag all your RSS feeds when adding them. Also, if you have EMMS, you can play podcasts right away pressing P in the * elfeed-show * buffer.
I use Reeder syncing with Feedbin. I couldn't be happier. Yes, Reeder rarely gets an update but it works well and I believe it gets updated whenever is necessary — which is enough for me.
Feedbin, however, is just fantastic. Easily the best service I've been using for years, along with Pinboard.
I'm using the same combination. Daily and with zero issues.
Of course I'd wish Reeder was more actively developed, but thinking about it there simply isn't anything missing. And if OP is dissatisfied with the available RSS clients there's always Feedbin's web interface.
> inbox got a bit out of hand by having too many unread items piled up. I slowly stopped looking at them before abandoning the idea completely
And this is precisely why it's insane and counterproductive to have unread counts on an RSS feed.
Don't obsess over reading every last article. It's a feed. Read what looks interesting. Let other things go. Don't track what you've read or what you've missed. There's nothing down that path but frustration and stress.
And yet, almost no RSS developers see the wisdom in this, and they prefer to embrace the dumb idea with open arms.
I think that also wouldn't solve the issue, what needs to be handled better is the difference between high volume feeds and low volume feeds.
I absolutely want to see every post of my friend's blog that has a post every few months. What I don't care about is to get every single MacRumors post with the latest gossip because that would make up about 15 items / day. I've seen some of the hosted solutions going into that direction but there doesn't seem to be a self-hosted or app doing that yet.
114 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadWhat about running TT-RSS locally and fetching from it with FeedTheMonkey? Probably the same limitations, but I put it out there.
https://github.com/ViennaRSS/vienna-rss
Fever is mentioned by a (main?) developer in one of the issues (dated 2013)
https://github.com/ViennaRSS/vienna-rss/issues/160#issuecomm...
If anyone has any suggestions for a FOSS selfhosted sync backend, I'd appreciate them.
Lack of screenshots usually indicates to me that the interface is probably not worth showing.
We had some issues with Wordpress a year ago and I haven’t got around to finishing the site.
I have feeds. They have posts. I read (some). The end.
There's nothing I'm missing, nothing that's broken. Complaining just about missing updates probably explains why the author never got to read anything: he was too busy fiddling with the reading experience.
This seems a little weird, no? Reeder's a one time purchase, not a subscription service or anything, so it seems kinda strange to be so worried about "a sign of life" for it. Lots of software used every day live in "maintenance only" or even "not maintained mode".
The code is open source and actively developed, which gives me peace of mind when I pay my yearly subscription.
On my Mac I tried liking Reeder 3, but TBH NewsBlur’s web interface is better. Reeder can use NewsBlur’s API and the syncing between mobile and desktop is nice to have.
NewsBlur’s author has been very responsive to issues and has been actively improving the service.
I also tried self-hosting various web solutions but it’s too much of a hassle, a constant security risk and paying for a VPS ends up being more expensive.
[1] There are a bunch of tools that can do this, but I'm going to give a totally unbiased recommendation for https://github.com/zsau/feedmail/
The free NewsBlur does remove unread items older than 7 days or so I believe but the paid version raises that up to a month or so.
Through the combination I get a very good sync of my read, and starred items and Reeder 3 offers some nifty integrations with services like Pinboard and a decent built-in browser and a 'text only' version of the website which makes it easier to read in a small screen.
This happened a lot on High Sierra, and the Mojave beta has made it much worse (although that is to be expected).
We should all switch to subscriptions for apps that we use seriously, to avoid this exact problem.
My only complaint would be I’d prefer to use the native share sheet, not have to go through the Reeder one to get to the native one. But that’s not a huge problem. And I think Reeder may predate useful share sheets in iOS.
RSS is just a niche product, bring it up with your average user and they probably won't know what you're talking about. I'm just glad these apps are still around. Maybe we'll once get a resurgence like Podcasts.
The one thing I wish it had was a webview that would honor my content blockers; I think it's still using an outdated webview API on macOS.
If there's an app with subscription pricing where I know it's a sustainable app for the developer and it'll get adapted to support new macOS features (or updated APIs like you said) then I'm happy to do that. I don't need updates every month, I just want to know that if there's a problem the developer will deal with it at some point.
I think we’re just conditioned to expect super frequent updates for everything every few weeks. Reeder is old school that way.
Having said that I only use it on iOS. On the Mac I use Feedly in a browser.
There are some nice self-hosted RSS aggregators but in the end I just 'solved' this problem by subscribing to Inoreader. Its web app is convenient, resource-friendly and has more features than I will ever need. Their Android app also looks very polished. It is reliable to fetch article contents for header only feeds and because most RSS feeds are just pointers to web content I am just fine with not having a native app on my Mac/PC.
And an RSS reader? I'm starting to get the feeling that Mac apps are stuck in 2005.
Say all you want about Microsoft or Electron, but VS Code is the only developer app on my computer that doesn't feel out of place or have a strange and outdated UI. I don't care that it's consuming the resources of my cheap desktop computer slightly faster than another app might, it gets the job done and it's intuitive and works well.
I still use it from time to time even though I know that it's probably at the end of it's life.
VS Code feels nothing like any other app on my Mac.
The window chrome doesn't look like a Mac app. Resizing a window resizes like an app from the 90s (content doesn't layout until the resize finishes, only the window border resizes live). The scroll bars aren't consistent with any other app, neither are the tabs. Scrolling content doesn't overscroll and rubberband like other scroll views.
You might personally prefer the UI in VS Code, but it is the poster child for "strange UI" on that platform.
(Other than that, it seems completely natural for a feed reader to be a web app. Not sure what the fuss is about.)
I wish ReadKit didn't seem abandoned. Great keyboard shortcuts, Pocket integration, and no attempts to algorithmically sort items. I wonder if this is another app that got hurt by the lack of upgrade pricing in the Mac App Store. I'd pay again if I could.
[0] https://twitter.com/brentsimmons/status/1020079742869884928
I used to use Pulse, but it was bought by LinkedIn and completely messed up after that. Then I switched to using Apple News to follow some sites. But News is not a proper RSS reader as such, and Apple has done little to improve it since it was released with iOS 9 — still supported and available only in a few countries, cannot add RSS feeds, cannot find certain sites through a search, and very weird bugs if one switches the region setting. It's basically abandonware, as far as feature richness and expansion are concerned. Three years on, I still don't understand why the app cannot be available worldwide and work as a feed reader too.
I've tried Flipboard, but I don't like the fancy magazine-like layout and navigation (which I find unintuitive).
Would love some feedback!
I'm working with the author to make a feed summary page like some other readers have, if you prefer to see things collapsed that way.
still works perfectly for me...
I only use it for Youtube subscriptions though, so that I don't need a Google account to follow channels I like.
Feedbin, however, is just fantastic. Easily the best service I've been using for years, along with Pinboard.
Of course I'd wish Reeder was more actively developed, but thinking about it there simply isn't anything missing. And if OP is dissatisfied with the available RSS clients there's always Feedbin's web interface.
And this is precisely why it's insane and counterproductive to have unread counts on an RSS feed.
Don't obsess over reading every last article. It's a feed. Read what looks interesting. Let other things go. Don't track what you've read or what you've missed. There's nothing down that path but frustration and stress.
And yet, almost no RSS developers see the wisdom in this, and they prefer to embrace the dumb idea with open arms.
I absolutely want to see every post of my friend's blog that has a post every few months. What I don't care about is to get every single MacRumors post with the latest gossip because that would make up about 15 items / day. I've seen some of the hosted solutions going into that direction but there doesn't seem to be a self-hosted or app doing that yet.
I handle this by subdividing my feeds into useful categories- a feature which every RSS client supports.
My friend's blogs are placed in a category alongside other low-volume feeds. I never miss a post.
I found a project similar to this, but unfortunately I can't find it again. Rawdog is a little rough around the edges, but worth a try.