I started out with NNW and am back on it now. After Google killed Reader I went to Feedly, then tried a few self-hosted solutions and, in the end, NNW is just the easiest solution for me since I'm in the Apple ecosystem.
Hands down the best RSS reader I've used. It's fast, tiny, built extremely well, and has no flab. It sits in a certain class of application along with Alfred and a handful of others in being a standout example of craftsmanship that's reminiscent of the golden era of OS X. More apps should strive for this standard.
I wish it had a more accessible scripting API - I use it locally, and back up saved stories, but I have to directly hit their sqlite database to extract data out of it :/
With so many apps introducing either paywalls (requiring either login or circumvention measures) or terrible RSS feeds (with content missing, images missing etc.) I have found it necessary to use a feed reader that you can configure per-feed to open either:
The biggest problem with newsreaders, IME, has been managing large numbers of feeds. Most user time is spent handling redundant stories - e.g., if you have feeds from many major news sources, for each major event you get one or more stories on each feed, saying mostly the same things.
I haven't seen a newsreader solve that problem. Has anyone tried an LLM?
The best solution I know is grouping redundant stories together, possibly hierarchically: e.g., Sports > Olympics > Figure skating > Jones performance. (Fewer feeds require fewer levels, possibly just one.)
That ~ deduplicates the stories and, by displaying them together, you can compare and choose the coverage you like and delete the rest. Otherwise, IME most user time is spent sorting through redundant stories one at a time.
But as I said, I haven't seen a newsreader do that well. It seems like a good fit for LLMs. Or maybe there's another solution besides grouping?
You specify your interests as free form text, it ranks articles by how closely they match, and you can consume your Scour feed as an RSS feed to read it in NNW.
I've been thinking of how to tackle that problem. It would require a bit of resources but nothing too crazy. Essentially new articles need to be indexed in some kind of vector search capable DB. That allows things like similarity grouping and a few other things. This is nothing new and exactly how things like Google News work. The difference here would be keeping the per user notion of subscribing only to things they care about.
If you do the embeddings calculation centrally, it becomes shared cost. Every new article gets analyzed only once for all users.
The rest then becomes providing a new view on your RSS feeds that leverages that. You could do a lot of the expensive stuff (vector comparisons) locally actually because most users only have hundreds/thousands of articles that they care about. So, simply download the embeddings for articles and do the comparisons/grouping locally.
This wouldn't be super hard to do. There are lots of OSS models that you can run locally as well. But they are kind of slow. So the trick is to amortize that over many users and share the burden.
The key challenge here is the finances. The centralized embeddings juggling gets costly quickly and you need a revenue model to finance that. That's why most of this stuff is happening by paywalls and staying kind of niche. All the "free" stuff is essentially ad sponsored.
But with some MCP layered on top and a few other bits and bobs, you could fairly easily implement an intelligent LLM based news agent that summarizes personalized news based on exactly your own preferences and news subscriptions. I haven't really seen anything like this done right. But we technically have all the OSS tech and models to do all of this now. It's just the compute cost that kills the use case.
If that could be decentralized bittorrent style, it wouldn't actually be that much of a burden. Given enough users, distributing say thousands of article updates per minute among tens/hundreds of thousands of readers means each of them expending maybe a couple of seconds of compute once in a while to calculate embeddings for articles that they are pulling that don't have embeddings yet. If you make that eventually consistent, it's not that big of a deal if you don't get embeddings for all the new stuff right away. And any finished embeddings could be uploaded and shared. Anything popular would quickly get embeddings. And you could make the point that publishers themselves could be providing embeddings as well for their own articles. Why not? If you only publish a handful of articles, the cost is next to nothing.
If I had more spare time, I might have a go at this. Sadly, I don't.
It's very interesting and thanks for laying out the issues.
One point I'd like to make: Grouping RSS feed items by similarity is much different than LLM summaries. In the former, I get the best (I can use economically), specific, expert human information, which is what I'm personally after; the latter keeps the economy but eliminates the value.
Not to take away from NetNewsWires accomplishments, but getting it was such a disappointment. Adding insult to injury, I had to pay to get the app on my iPad. It was one of the few apps I paid for and all I got was a deep sense of wasted money.
Since the demise of Byline, I’ve been rocking Inoreader and have had no reason to look back.
All I miss is Google Reader, but that’s never coming back.
The only new thing I want in an RSS reader is a handsfree, voice only mode. Being able to listen to RSS articles and navigating by voice commands.
I was on Google Reader, then Feedly for a long time, until the Feedly iOS client just slowly degraded and got buggy. I'm not opposed to paying for a good RSS set.
I finally switched to NetNewsWire as the front end and FreshRSS on the backend, and could not be happier. NNW being free is just the icing on the cake, it's really great, and FreshRSS was also really easy to install.
What I like about FreshRSS is that it's PHP and will install on any old shared hosting plan and uses Sqlite as the database, super easy.
I love NNW, especially the new iteration since Brent got it back. Mac-assed software at its best.
The other day I was searching for how to turn a youtube channel into an RSS feed and tried all sorts of convoluted instructions for finding channel IDs, etc. At some point I thought this is the kind of user-centric thing that NNW has probably already thought of, and sure enough, if you just paste in a youtube channel URL as the feed, NNW sorts it out and creates a feed for you.
I'm staying away from macOS Tahoe for now. NetNewsWire has already announced that they will no longer support the earlier 6.x release that I use. I assume that means no bug fixes or back-porting of new features. Sad.
They update a little too slow for my taste. But, well… that’s the cost for high-quality free software: waiting. I’m happy to pay said cost, and continue to recommend it to friends and family where I can.
First RSS client I ever used. First for which I bought a license. Reeder client seduced me away while NNW was in limbo while Brent Simmons (creator) wasn't working on it directly. Glad he's back at the helm. I never unsubscribed from his blog.
We believe that apps should never crash. They should be free of bugs. They should be fast — they should feel lighter-than-air.
We believe that quality is more important than just piling on features; we believe that quality is the most important feature. And we believe that high quality is transformative — it makes for an app you never hesitate to reach for. You can rely on it, and you do, again and again.
This makes us slow to add features. We are adding features — but never at the expense of how it feels. Never at the expense of reliability and speed.
43 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 67.5 ms ] threadI think NetNewsWire is a great example of what software should strive for: a useful set of features, while being fast and smooth.
Every time I open the app I feel like I'm back in the era of Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Steve Jobs is about to reveal one more thing.
- The feed item (read the XML)
- The site fulltext
- The original site (in case of login required)
For me that app is https://www.lireapp.com/
I haven't seen a newsreader solve that problem. Has anyone tried an LLM?
The best solution I know is grouping redundant stories together, possibly hierarchically: e.g., Sports > Olympics > Figure skating > Jones performance. (Fewer feeds require fewer levels, possibly just one.)
That ~ deduplicates the stories and, by displaying them together, you can compare and choose the coverage you like and delete the rest. Otherwise, IME most user time is spent sorting through redundant stories one at a time.
But as I said, I haven't seen a newsreader do that well. It seems like a good fit for LLMs. Or maybe there's another solution besides grouping?
You specify your interests as free form text, it ranks articles by how closely they match, and you can consume your Scour feed as an RSS feed to read it in NNW.
Disclaimer: I’m the developer
If you do the embeddings calculation centrally, it becomes shared cost. Every new article gets analyzed only once for all users.
The rest then becomes providing a new view on your RSS feeds that leverages that. You could do a lot of the expensive stuff (vector comparisons) locally actually because most users only have hundreds/thousands of articles that they care about. So, simply download the embeddings for articles and do the comparisons/grouping locally.
This wouldn't be super hard to do. There are lots of OSS models that you can run locally as well. But they are kind of slow. So the trick is to amortize that over many users and share the burden.
The key challenge here is the finances. The centralized embeddings juggling gets costly quickly and you need a revenue model to finance that. That's why most of this stuff is happening by paywalls and staying kind of niche. All the "free" stuff is essentially ad sponsored.
But with some MCP layered on top and a few other bits and bobs, you could fairly easily implement an intelligent LLM based news agent that summarizes personalized news based on exactly your own preferences and news subscriptions. I haven't really seen anything like this done right. But we technically have all the OSS tech and models to do all of this now. It's just the compute cost that kills the use case.
If that could be decentralized bittorrent style, it wouldn't actually be that much of a burden. Given enough users, distributing say thousands of article updates per minute among tens/hundreds of thousands of readers means each of them expending maybe a couple of seconds of compute once in a while to calculate embeddings for articles that they are pulling that don't have embeddings yet. If you make that eventually consistent, it's not that big of a deal if you don't get embeddings for all the new stuff right away. And any finished embeddings could be uploaded and shared. Anything popular would quickly get embeddings. And you could make the point that publishers themselves could be providing embeddings as well for their own articles. Why not? If you only publish a handful of articles, the cost is next to nothing.
If I had more spare time, I might have a go at this. Sadly, I don't.
One point I'd like to make: Grouping RSS feed items by similarity is much different than LLM summaries. In the former, I get the best (I can use economically), specific, expert human information, which is what I'm personally after; the latter keeps the economy but eliminates the value.
Since the demise of Byline, I’ve been rocking Inoreader and have had no reason to look back.
All I miss is Google Reader, but that’s never coming back.
The only new thing I want in an RSS reader is a handsfree, voice only mode. Being able to listen to RSS articles and navigating by voice commands.
I finally switched to NetNewsWire as the front end and FreshRSS on the backend, and could not be happier. NNW being free is just the icing on the cake, it's really great, and FreshRSS was also really easy to install.
What I like about FreshRSS is that it's PHP and will install on any old shared hosting plan and uses Sqlite as the database, super easy.
The other day I was searching for how to turn a youtube channel into an RSS feed and tried all sorts of convoluted instructions for finding channel IDs, etc. At some point I thought this is the kind of user-centric thing that NNW has probably already thought of, and sure enough, if you just paste in a youtube channel URL as the feed, NNW sorts it out and creates a feed for you.
We need more software that is free, open source and comes with no subscriptions.
you didn't say why you prefer use of the earlier version, but i'm curious.
"""
We believe that apps should never crash. They should be free of bugs. They should be fast — they should feel lighter-than-air.
We believe that quality is more important than just piling on features; we believe that quality is the most important feature. And we believe that high quality is transformative — it makes for an app you never hesitate to reach for. You can rely on it, and you do, again and again.
This makes us slow to add features. We are adding features — but never at the expense of how it feels. Never at the expense of reliability and speed.
Reading this from NNW via hnrss.org