I see a lot of options for self-hosting RSS subscriptions and I don’t actually understand what they are for. The very nature of RSS is that it tracks and connects to online content. It seems like having a home server track and download the content just so that you can download it on another device from your server instead of the original servers a bit redundant. Also, it seems like the clients are more limited, since it has ro connect to your personal host, as opposed to the many RSS readers available.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I genuinely don’t get it. What am I missing?
Oh I can actually answer something, neat.
I thought I was missing the appeal too, but when I got back into tabletop roleplaying games, a lot of the community is located over on Substack blogs, and I don’t like Substack. My solution was to start running FreshRSS and put all of the feeds into it so I could read at my own pace, and also not have to go to a million sites to keep track of content. Saves me a lot of tabs in an internet browser, if nothing else.
Sadly, not all sites or blogs have RSS feeds to hand out, but I’ve used https://openrss.org/ to get around that for the most part if they don’t.
which blogs do you follow over on substack? ive never had the issue of feeling like a lot of ttrpg people are there, most people i follow are most active on their own sites (eg troypress, jeremy strandberg) or, tragically, on discord.
IMO, I think my answer here is really the same for all of my self-hosted apps: I want to control the flow of the data myself and not be upset when an app we use every day is retired or changed or just enshittifies over time. And this way, I know nobody is in between me and the news publisher. They can see what I read but nobody else is watching over that process in the middle.
I was a loyal Inoreader fan for many years before switching to FreshRSS on my server and I won’t go back. That’s a great service but self hosting any app is just better.
I can access my RSS feeds on multiple devices without losing track of what I’ve already read.
I integrate Miniflux with readeck, which is then combined with a readeck plugin for koreader, allowing me to easily read articles on my ereader, without relying on a paid service.
I’m also one of those people that still uses custom ROMs on Android, and since the backup and restore situation is still kind of dire if you don’t use Google (and sometimes even with) it’s easier to have most of my configuration and state stored on a server, and so I can wipe a phone with relatively little risk.
I use Wallabag in a similar way.
I self-host RSSHub so my reader can pull feeds for websites that don’t provide them. I don’t host my reader, though.
Most company-owned services are 1) Tracking your behavior 2) Going to upsell you (freemium, etc.) You think Feedly is ‘free’ - not really, they are collecting your info and have a team of marketers trying to figure out how to get $$ out of you, and will slowly gate features behind the paywall.
MinifluxRSS with Nextflux frontend (browser) and Caddy for Android. You can now write .py/etc. scripts to capture your starred items to Obsidian (or favorite PKB), run AI on those to summarize, tag, and organize. I find it easier and it will never ‘shut down’ or change model.
I just use freshrss in the browser so no issue with syncing other devices, or clients.
Pretty much what others said, I host Fresh RSS.
