I was looking into this a few days ago, but was having a hard time finding an RSS reader that was desktop software and handled Youtube feeds. I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t tied to a SaaS or required hosting online.
I believe yarr fills all your requirements. Can run as standalone on linux, and if you click "read here" the video gets embed. Assuming an extra click is not disqualifying. Note I have not verified this because I host it on a VPS.
> Their main purpose is enabling their users to consume content
Here we go again... no, "consume content" is what the commercial social networks want you to do so you stick around until the next ad break. (Maybe even what a commercial SaaS RSS reader wants you to do so you pay the next bill.)
I use RSS specifically to get away from generic "content". Instead I read to learn things, and to explore opoinions I might not otherwise come in contact with, and to socialise with other people.
If you're in the Apple ecosystem (Mac, iPhone) NetNewsWire is an absolute delight. It's not a commercial product any more, Brent Simmons runs it as a (very serious) passion project. Here's a recent post by him explaining part of his philosophy for it: https://inessential.com/2025/10/04/why-netnewswire-is-not-we...
Crucially, it syncs feed read state between my laptop and phone.
NNW got me paying for my first RSS client. Reeder got me while it was semi-retired. I still have NNW installed just for nostalgia. Both are great and a solid RSS client is one of the first three apps I'd install on any / every device.
I use NetNewsWire as a frontend, and self-hosted FreshRSS as backend for sync and feed management. Works a treat across multiple devices, Mac/iOS/iPadOS and web.
I started out with NNW then went to Reeder when iPhone came out. Later on google shut down their endeavor and I became frustrated with all the *free* alternatives—luckily I stumbled across News Explorer which I believe was the first (or one of the first) to do iCloud syncing so I could ditch the middleman.
I suggested iCloud sync to Brent but was first rebuffed about the poor technical aspects and problems that it had. For those who remember the sentiment around that time was that iCloud sync was unreliable yet News Explorer was proof that it was working just fine.
Brent later backtracked for which I am very happy, I've been using NNW ever since.
I only wish it had RSS filtering to weed out the shitposts, I believe they're working on it. In the meantime I've been using Feed Rinse.
I used NNW for a LONG LONG TIME. It's great software.
There was a period when it was not as useful, though, and I migrated away, but I still think of it very fondly.
My current RSS consumption toolchain uses Feedbin as the back end / syncing host, and their web app is good enough that I no longer use a native tool on my Mac. On my phone and iPad I use Reeder.
It currently only runs in Firefox but if anyone is interested, I'll Port it to Chrome since it now supports a sidebar interface.
I made this because I wanted to have feeds show up where I read them, in the browser, and I wanted it on my own device so nobody else controls it. No hosting, no payment, just a simple tool that lets me control what I read.
Bonus: if you try it you'll likely increase the global usage by double digits ;)
Interested. I miss when Firefox sorted in natively, even if it was bare minimum. I've been looking for a lightweight RSS reader for desktop. I'd probably ditch my mobile app too if this was compatible with Firefox mobile.
I used Feeder on my Android phone for the longest time. Recently set up a NixOS server and enabled FreshRSS on it, with FocusReader as the Android client. It is very nice to manage feeds on a server and have the read/unread status sync across devices.
If you have only used device-local readers before and have a server to spare, I recommend at least trying it!
This is a nice overview but is also obviously content marketing for Lighthouse, which, fine.
I use Feedly, and generally like it, but the issue with RSS has very little to do with reader front ends and largely to do with how a lot of people don't publish full articles on RSS, images don't work, etc. The demo images of all the readers are like best case scenario - most non-personal sites only publish a paragraph or two, if that, making the reader more of a link aggregator.
FreshRSS supports CSS selectors and others to get the full content.
I've also built a bunch of RSS feed hydrators myself where the process of getting content to the feed isn't as simple as "grab that bit of the page".
Like my HN feed uses Opengraph information from the linked article to fill in a picture and preview as well as the Algolia HN api to get scores and comment counts.
Big fan of https://github.com/synzen/MonitoRSS, not mentioned in the article. I self host at home and it sends feed updates to my own Discord server. I appreciate the customization for how the feed notification appear in Discord.
I wanted to have a list of latest posts of blogs I follow and that I can access it quickly from both PC and mobile phone without any signing in. Then I decided to do it myself like that.
There is a github workflow that runs automatically every 6 hours and updates that page.
I was wondering why Tiny Tiny RSS was missing as that's what I've been using for the last 10+ years. At the bottom of the article there's the explanation:
> On October 3rd the maintainer announced that he's going to stop working on it, and will remove all infrastructure on November 1st. Forks of the project with other maintainers may pop up, but at the moment it's too soon to tell what the future of Tiny Tiny RSS will be.
The person who forked it (https://github.com/tt-rss/tt-rss) was very active on the original Tiny Tiny RSS development side as well as on the forums. I have a good feeling that this fork will work out just fine.
I still miss Google Reader. I loved the social aspects, where I could repost my favorite articles (with comments about them), and friends could easily subscribe to my feed and comment on my shares. It was a really great social network for sharing blog posts and articles. I credit the demise of Google Reader with a lot of the downfall of the Old Web.
Since then, social sharing platforms are motivated to keep you on their platform. I recently ran an experiment on Facebook, where I posted a link to a content creator's video on YouTube with a lot of my thoughts about it.
I then downloaded the same video from YouTube and uploaded it to Facebook (this particular creator didn't upload his content to Facebook directly), and posted the exact same text content (but this time, hid the link the the source video in a comment).
The post where I downloaded + reposted the video got about 1000x more views than the one where I linked to the source.
On top of that, Facebook will often hide the link to the source video unless I click "Show all comments" (rather than the default "Show most relevant").
Facebook deprioritizes (shadowbans?) posts that link off of their platform, and it starts feeling like a stagnant pond. It's frustrating that it's difficult to share insightful blog posts on that platform, and I'm feeling pretty done with it.
Getting a good RSS reader isn't the part that I'm looking for -- I want the easy social aspect that Google Reader and Google+ gave me.
Google Reader was killed by Vic because it was the only "social" app at Google at the time. He wanted to grow their FB competitor (G+) and insisted on migrating users over from Reader to G+, which never happened.
Decentralized social RSS feed / article recommendations could totally happen if the community came up with a standard way to implement it.
Re-posting / paraphrasing a comment I made in a discussion about decentralized recommendation algorithms for RSS feed content:
People used to post a "blogroll" (and sometimes an OPML file) to their personal blogs showing the feeds they followed. That was one way to do decentralized recommendations, albeit manually since there was no well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files. If there was a well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files a client could build a recommendation graph.
OMPL files in well-known locations would be neat but would only provide feed-level recommendation. Article-level recommendation would be cooler.
One of the various federated/decentralized/whatever-Bluesky-is "modern" re-implementations of Twitter/NNTP could be used to drive article-level recommendations. My feed reader could emit machine-readable recommendation posts based on ratings I give while browsing articles. My feed reader could consume these recommendations from others, and then lots of fun could be had weighting recommendations based on social graph, algorithmic summary of the article body, trustworthiness of the poster, friend-of-friend status, etc.
I thought about some of this stuff back in '05 when I tried to contribute to ttrss. The maintainer didn't have much interest so I dropped it. I've thought about it periodically but never had the initiative to do anything with it.
Shameless plug but you might enjoy the site I've been working on for the past few years: lynkmi.com
It's very much inspired by the earlier web and more recently especially catalysed by the trend you note of the big sites punishing doors to elsewhere. I remember a time when Facebook actually had a "links" section where you could see a list of all the cool stuff you had posted, so it's sad they've strayed so far.
Join the resistance! Every tag and profile automatically has an RSS feed too, and I just recently added internal backlinks which I'm enjoying a lot.
I've been a big fan of Iconfactory's Tapestry for a while now. It supports RSS, plus a bunch of custom connectors for non-RSS things. You could write your own to pull down whatever random thing you wanted, like GitHub Actions outputs or screenshots of your home webcam.
Last update was 4 years ago; I don't know if this means the project is dead or merely "done." One of the last features added was the ability to share a news item to Hacker News:
If you are in the Apple ecosystem I recommend News Explorer. It has a very nice interface and it syncs with your iCloud. It is a one-time payment of $4.99.
122 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/nkanaev/yarr
Here we go again... no, "consume content" is what the commercial social networks want you to do so you stick around until the next ad break. (Maybe even what a commercial SaaS RSS reader wants you to do so you pay the next bill.)
I use RSS specifically to get away from generic "content". Instead I read to learn things, and to explore opoinions I might not otherwise come in contact with, and to socialise with other people.
Crucially, it syncs feed read state between my laptop and phone.
Works perfectly with a self-hosted FreshRSS backend.
I suggested iCloud sync to Brent but was first rebuffed about the poor technical aspects and problems that it had. For those who remember the sentiment around that time was that iCloud sync was unreliable yet News Explorer was proof that it was working just fine.
Brent later backtracked for which I am very happy, I've been using NNW ever since.
I only wish it had RSS filtering to weed out the shitposts, I believe they're working on it. In the meantime I've been using Feed Rinse.
http://www.feedrinse.com/index-old.php
There was a period when it was not as useful, though, and I migrated away, but I still think of it very fondly.
My current RSS consumption toolchain uses Feedbin as the back end / syncing host, and their web app is good enough that I no longer use a native tool on my Mac. On my phone and iPad I use Reeder.
https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/T...
It currently only runs in Firefox but if anyone is interested, I'll Port it to Chrome since it now supports a sidebar interface.
I made this because I wanted to have feeds show up where I read them, in the browser, and I wanted it on my own device so nobody else controls it. No hosting, no payment, just a simple tool that lets me control what I read.
Bonus: if you try it you'll likely increase the global usage by double digits ;)
If you have only used device-local readers before and have a server to spare, I recommend at least trying it!
I use Feedly, and generally like it, but the issue with RSS has very little to do with reader front ends and largely to do with how a lot of people don't publish full articles on RSS, images don't work, etc. The demo images of all the readers are like best case scenario - most non-personal sites only publish a paragraph or two, if that, making the reader more of a link aggregator.
I've also built a bunch of RSS feed hydrators myself where the process of getting content to the feed isn't as simple as "grab that bit of the page".
Like my HN feed uses Opengraph information from the linked article to fill in a picture and preview as well as the Algolia HN api to get scores and comment counts.
Would be cool if lawnchair for android could integrate RSS as news feed..
I wanted to have a list of latest posts of blogs I follow and that I can access it quickly from both PC and mobile phone without any signing in. Then I decided to do it myself like that. There is a github workflow that runs automatically every 6 hours and updates that page.
> On October 3rd the maintainer announced that he's going to stop working on it, and will remove all infrastructure on November 1st. Forks of the project with other maintainers may pop up, but at the moment it's too soon to tell what the future of Tiny Tiny RSS will be.
Since then, social sharing platforms are motivated to keep you on their platform. I recently ran an experiment on Facebook, where I posted a link to a content creator's video on YouTube with a lot of my thoughts about it.
I then downloaded the same video from YouTube and uploaded it to Facebook (this particular creator didn't upload his content to Facebook directly), and posted the exact same text content (but this time, hid the link the the source video in a comment).
The post where I downloaded + reposted the video got about 1000x more views than the one where I linked to the source.
On top of that, Facebook will often hide the link to the source video unless I click "Show all comments" (rather than the default "Show most relevant").
Facebook deprioritizes (shadowbans?) posts that link off of their platform, and it starts feeling like a stagnant pond. It's frustrating that it's difficult to share insightful blog posts on that platform, and I'm feeling pretty done with it.
Getting a good RSS reader isn't the part that I'm looking for -- I want the easy social aspect that Google Reader and Google+ gave me.
maybe you have causation wrong. social platforms were so effective they caused downfall of old web, and with it the demise of Google Reader
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Gundotra#Career
Re-posting / paraphrasing a comment I made in a discussion about decentralized recommendation algorithms for RSS feed content:
People used to post a "blogroll" (and sometimes an OPML file) to their personal blogs showing the feeds they followed. That was one way to do decentralized recommendations, albeit manually since there was no well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files. If there was a well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files a client could build a recommendation graph.
OMPL files in well-known locations would be neat but would only provide feed-level recommendation. Article-level recommendation would be cooler.
One of the various federated/decentralized/whatever-Bluesky-is "modern" re-implementations of Twitter/NNTP could be used to drive article-level recommendations. My feed reader could emit machine-readable recommendation posts based on ratings I give while browsing articles. My feed reader could consume these recommendations from others, and then lots of fun could be had weighting recommendations based on social graph, algorithmic summary of the article body, trustworthiness of the poster, friend-of-friend status, etc.
I thought about some of this stuff back in '05 when I tried to contribute to ttrss. The maintainer didn't have much interest so I dropped it. I've thought about it periodically but never had the initiative to do anything with it.
It's very much inspired by the earlier web and more recently especially catalysed by the trend you note of the big sites punishing doors to elsewhere. I remember a time when Facebook actually had a "links" section where you could see a list of all the cool stuff you had posted, so it's sad they've strayed so far.
Join the resistance! Every tag and profile automatically has an RSS feed too, and I just recently added internal backlinks which I'm enjoying a lot.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...
So my real question is what is the value of Lighthouse compared to Feedly or Inoreader?
https://github.com/QuiteRSS/quiterss
Last update was 4 years ago; I don't know if this means the project is dead or merely "done." One of the last features added was the ability to share a news item to Hacker News:
https://github.com/QuiteRSS/quiterss/issues/1084#issue-33248...
I have used this app on Windows and macOS; I've installed it on Linux but I don't do daily work on Linux so I don't know if it's stable there or not.
can't we just call things "A thorough examination / analysis" anymore?
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/news-explorer/id1032668306
https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS
https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds
My problem with most RSS do not have great search. With 500+ sources this can become problem.
https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - my own project