I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS - and You Should Too
I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS - and You Should Too
Joey Einerhand's Portfolio and tech blog.
Blogger discovers this cool thing called "RSS".
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I've been interested in trying out RSS again but I don't want to self-host. Can anyone recommend a RSS client (hosted, local, or whatever) that they like?
I used Feedly since Google Reader was shut down. Then 1.5 years ago, as Feedly was getting more paywalls and AI-crap, I switched to Newsblur, and have been a happy user ever since. I love its Intelligence Trainer that lets me hide posts with certain tags/authors/keywords.
Unlimited hosted-by-them Newsblur costs 36 USD / year. It has a FLOSS version and a more limited free hosted-by-them version, but the 2.5 GBP / month was worth the QoL increase for me.
there are some publically available FreshRSS instances that you can make an account with, I personally use hostux. you can access it with the browser and any apps that support FreshRSS (in my case, Read You or Capy Reader on Android, and sometimes RSS Guard on desktop).
It can be as simple as just putting an app on your phone. I use feeder which is fine. Pretty bare bones, but in that way it's easy to learn and use.
I've also been meaning to try out an app called Nunti, which I heard about a while ago from this Lemmy post. It claims to be an RSS reader with the added benefit of an (open source and fully local) algorithm to provide some light curation of your feed. It looks interesting, but I haven't actually tried it out yet because I'm still deciding whether I want any algorithm curating my feed, even one as transparent as Nunti's. It's also only available through F-Droid right now, which is a bit of a barrier to entry.
The fact that it's only available through fdroid is actually a good thing in my opinion.
If it's open source, you could perhaps tinker with the algorithm. My main desires for rss feeds are:
- a way to filter out fluff affiliate link articles (e.g., 8 best gadgets on sale for prime day)
- a way to cluster articles on the same topic (i don't really need to read 5 articles about the same news item)
Any clue if nunti could do that?
Newsblur can do the first kind of filtering. You select "best gadgets" in the title, and all posts on that feed with that phrase in the title will be hidden from then on.
Feeder can do keyword filtering on titles, but not on a per feed basis, and only with simple wildcards. I've been able to filter out a bit with it, though.
Man, I feel you on the affiliate link fluff. I actually ended up unsubscribing from the Popular Mechanics and Popular Science feeds because the signal to noise ratio was so bad.
The creator of Nunti provided a very good primer on the algorithm design here. Basically, you indicate to the app whether you like or dislike an article and then it does some keyword extraction in the background and tries to show you similar articles in the future. I suppose you might be able to dislike a bunch of the fluff and hope the filter picks up on it, but it isn't really designed to support the kind of rules that would completely purge a certain type of content from your feed.
Oh wow, they really did a good job of explaining it. It's not too complex. I think it probably would be able to filter out some of the fluff.
Thunderbird has RSS integrated, which could be quite neat once that synchronizes.
If you’re on iOS, feeeed is kinda slick :)
I needed this, thanks! For the lazy, it’s here.
I've had some decent times with inoreader.
inoreader seems very ergonomic, thanks!
On android i like ReadYou on fdroid
I prefer the Feedbro browser extension in Firefox. I think it is available for chrome/edge as well.