I was a NNW user for years and it's why I eventually built my own news reader. NNW had a lot of great features and I wanted to mostly keep them. You might find that NewsBlur takes a similar path but with a different set of opinions.
Personally I keep it syncing off TTRSS for filtering and automatic actioning on certain feed entries, but that aint everyone's cup of tea. I'd like to think NNW at least covers most people's use cases whether standalone or relying off another service to aggregate.
Seriously. I've been updating NewsBlur with all the pet features people have wanted for years and I'm finding that it's even more enjoyable now with all those AI features built in. Daily briefing, ask AI, story clustering, all of these are AI-flavored improvements to RSS and it's so relaxing to open up my river of news and scroll through all the good stuff without feeling a gross algorithm surfacing endless outrage.
I read plenty of X as well as scroll through various social media apps and nothing comes close to how great RSS feels to read.
RSS’ death is real - 15 years ago, almost every news site had a RSS feed, some had several ones. Today? RSS feed is rare.
So if you want to make news feed from news sites, you have to use parsing their html code, and ofc everybody has its own structure. JS powered sites are painful ones.
15 years ago, almost every news site had a RSS feed, some had several ones. Today? RSS feed is rare.
It may be a reflection of where you get your news.
New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Radio Free Europe, Mainichi, and lots of other legitimate primary source Big-J journalism news sites have RSS.
Rando McRepost's AI-Generated Rehash Blog? Not so much.
I saw Current Reader (no affiliation) posted on the web a couple days ago. It seems like a nice way to keep up to date with many hundreds of feeds by giving them different priorities, where for example a low priority feed may disappear from view quicker than a higher priority one. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/current-reader/id6758530974
I used to use Reeder pretty religiously but as websites started to lock down their feeds and charge subscriptions, it became less useful over time. As readership declines, publishers are rightly concerned to protect their remaining revenue by charging subscriptions. I would love for a new protocol to exist which could compensate providers appropriately and allow for consumer choice in reading with whatever app
Current setup is freshrss running in a proxmox lxc on prem + tailscale. Big fan of the lire iOS app for interacting on mobile and use the freshrss webui on desktop. killthenewsletter helps patch in some email stuff too. RSS and NNTP are 2 technologies that have been with me for decades and you are gonna have to pry them from me.
Nice! I'm also around 2000 feeds in my reader, carefully selected over a couple of years. Only difference: I always click through to the website to read an article.
Now in the process of slowly making RSS my only social feed. Have a hard time of leaving Youtube, but once I embedded the videos of the channels I follow in my RSS reader I see a way of not getting annoyed by the recommendation algorithm on their website anymore.
I think the space of RSS feed readers and aggregators are very rich already. The pain point for ordinary users is to have easy way to generate RSS feeds for websites that don't provide organic one.
There are few options but mostly proprietary and expensive. And no normal person will want to play the CSS tricks to extract feed that something like FreshRSS support.
I do feel like RSS feeds are one of the easier things to do DIY, custom to people's specific taste of how to list data of this sort. All the 'off the shelf' RSS feeds that I see feel contrived, cluttered and bloated.
Also built my own rss reader https://gmnz.xyz/projects/ember-feed/ with an emphasis on code block themes because I mostly follow engineering and developer blogs.
I’d like to use this space to praise everyone involved in creating and keeping NetNewsWire alive.
I (re)discovered RSS a few months ago via NetNewsWire, and it’s so calming and empowering to curate one’s own feed.
Rumors of RSS’ death are greatly exaggerated.
NetNewsWire is SO good - both the macOS and iPhone apps. Real labor of love. We are very lucky to have it.
I was a NNW user for years and it's why I eventually built my own news reader. NNW had a lot of great features and I wanted to mostly keep them. You might find that NewsBlur takes a similar path but with a different set of opinions.
Definitely my favorite mobile RSS app.
Personally I keep it syncing off TTRSS for filtering and automatic actioning on certain feed entries, but that aint everyone's cup of tea. I'd like to think NNW at least covers most people's use cases whether standalone or relying off another service to aggregate.
Seriously. I've been updating NewsBlur with all the pet features people have wanted for years and I'm finding that it's even more enjoyable now with all those AI features built in. Daily briefing, ask AI, story clustering, all of these are AI-flavored improvements to RSS and it's so relaxing to open up my river of news and scroll through all the good stuff without feeling a gross algorithm surfacing endless outrage.
I read plenty of X as well as scroll through various social media apps and nothing comes close to how great RSS feels to read.
RSS’ death is real - 15 years ago, almost every news site had a RSS feed, some had several ones. Today? RSS feed is rare.
So if you want to make news feed from news sites, you have to use parsing their html code, and ofc everybody has its own structure. JS powered sites are painful ones.
15 years ago, almost every news site had a RSS feed, some had several ones. Today? RSS feed is rare.
It may be a reflection of where you get your news.
New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Radio Free Europe, Mainichi, and lots of other legitimate primary source Big-J journalism news sites have RSS.
Rando McRepost's AI-Generated Rehash Blog? Not so much.
There are feeds of everything. You just have to look harder.
edit: provide an example please
Here's an example
https://help.abc.net.au/hc/en-us/articles/6147104938383-Why-...
Not exactly a "news" site, but this is still an example site that you'd expect would have a feed:
https://mistral.ai/news/
Love it, also shoutout to NewsFire from the days of yore.
https://newsfirex.com
Just look at it, NNW is still using the same great design.
I saw Current Reader (no affiliation) posted on the web a couple days ago. It seems like a nice way to keep up to date with many hundreds of feeds by giving them different priorities, where for example a low priority feed may disappear from view quicker than a higher priority one. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/current-reader/id6758530974
I used to use Reeder pretty religiously but as websites started to lock down their feeds and charge subscriptions, it became less useful over time. As readership declines, publishers are rightly concerned to protect their remaining revenue by charging subscriptions. I would love for a new protocol to exist which could compensate providers appropriately and allow for consumer choice in reading with whatever app
Current setup is freshrss running in a proxmox lxc on prem + tailscale. Big fan of the lire iOS app for interacting on mobile and use the freshrss webui on desktop. killthenewsletter helps patch in some email stuff too. RSS and NNTP are 2 technologies that have been with me for decades and you are gonna have to pry them from me.
I'm using FreshRSS as well, sitting on an OpenBSD VM. I use Capy Reader on Android, as well as the FreshRSS front end on desktop.
It does everything I need with no fuss.
Nice! I'm also around 2000 feeds in my reader, carefully selected over a couple of years. Only difference: I always click through to the website to read an article.
Now in the process of slowly making RSS my only social feed. Have a hard time of leaving Youtube, but once I embedded the videos of the channels I follow in my RSS reader I see a way of not getting annoyed by the recommendation algorithm on their website anymore.
YouTube does offer RSS feeds for each channel, you just need the channel id.
For example, the RSS feed for the defunctland channel is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCVo63lb....
I forgot to say, most of these 2000 feeds I have from here on HN. Please keep posting on your own website/blog and 'share' with RSS.
I think the space of RSS feed readers and aggregators are very rich already. The pain point for ordinary users is to have easy way to generate RSS feeds for websites that don't provide organic one.
There are few options but mostly proprietary and expensive. And no normal person will want to play the CSS tricks to extract feed that something like FreshRSS support.
And a little thought to Aaron. We still miss you.
I love RSS but I didn't find good enough online reader that can be customized to my liking, so I built my own: https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/news/
I have many more ideas, but I don't have that much free time to implement all of it (even with Claude Code). But it serves me very well for now
Here's mine: https://mechaelephant.com/feed
I do feel like RSS feeds are one of the easier things to do DIY, custom to people's specific taste of how to list data of this sort. All the 'off the shelf' RSS feeds that I see feel contrived, cluttered and bloated.
I'd like to share a preview of my RSS (&other sources) feed aggregator: https://aggly.com (designed to look better on desktops)
It’s still a work in progress, so treat this as an early preview before I submit it to Show HN. Feedback and criticism are welcome.
I’ve always thought RSS seemed cool. Hope it has a renaissance with people leaving social media
Also built my own rss reader https://gmnz.xyz/projects/ember-feed/ with an emphasis on code block themes because I mostly follow engineering and developer blogs.
Self-hosted miniflux is great.
I've been using Flare on f-droid, which integrates RSS and fedi, it's simple but pretty good.