RSS is the stands for Really Simple Syndication. (RIP Aaron Swartz) I’ve been using RSS feeds to get my news in one way or the other for the last five years. My current solution is Inoreader. Works fine, doesn’t get in the way, loads the entire article and has a good android widget which sort of serves as a news ticker on my home screen. I always wanted to try one of the many open source solutions out there but I never had the means or knowledge to deploy it locally or finances to purchase a subscription from services like NewsBlur.
It changed last month when I bought a mini PC to dive into the homelab life. The security is sort of jank and I don’t trust myself to open it to the public internet for a remote connection but I still wanted to experiment. I watched this video from Chris Titus Tech and wanted to try it out. Local only, nothing fancy. I don’t completely understand docker yet, so my current setup is with the help of CasaOS.
After spending a few minutes copy pasting commands from Chris’ blog and FreshRSS official documentation, I got both Full Text RSS and FreshRSS running. After some customization and tweaking I was ready to dive into the articles but FreshRSS wasn’t giving me the latest posts. I thought this was some mix up with the purge rules so I checked them again, stopped and restarted both Full Text RSS and FreshRSS but that didn’t help. After some digging I understood that this is a known issue with FreshRSS. The developer says it gets better overtime as you load and refresh more posts. Which makes sense but also doesn’t. After all that’s the point of a self-hosted service, to be able to control your internet experience.
docker rm prune
After looking for some other options, I found Miniflux. “Minimalist and opinionated feed reader” the developer says. Because of my poor docker skills it took me hours to figure out how to deploy this properly but I finally found an excellent, straightforward tutorial from NetSec. I used it for a couple of days and then it broke after a power recovery. Portainer showed that the app exited and it refused to restart. I think this is probably because lack of understanding of docker, portainer (and software in general) and I did something wrong in Portainer.
At this point I grew frustrated. Inoreader has the highest screentime on my phone. The tab is pinned on my desktop browser. But I really wanted to move to open source software and away from subscriptions as I was reaching the 150 feeds limit pretty quickly and also the ad-blocker notifications were getting more frequent.
I remembered that Thunderbird is still around. And actually released a major new update. I got reminded of it from a YouTube video. The best part about Thunderbird is how close it is to Firefox. The addons are mostly compatible with some tweaking. I tried to get mozilla’s readability view running on Thunderbird but couldn’t. So I installed Reader View addon which does the same thing. Although its a lot more bloated than miniflux and even FreshRSS infact, I have now settled with this as my solution. Its still jank, but with uBlock, Dark Reader and Reader View addons added with the help of their .ixp files, it seems to work okay.
Update: 16th December
I finally got Miniflux running! There’s some power recovery settings that I had to change and its perfect. I noticed that it has some issues with IGN and Kotaku feeds that’s probably due a security feature on the site’s side and sometimes a random feed breaks. A refresh usually fixes it but I don’t know why that is happening. But I’m glad its not jank anymore.
I read this post on HN and found feedi. The developer’s blog post makes it clear that I’m not alone in using social media as new aggregators and as information hubs than for social networking. It’s also clear that my approach to use readability.js to extract matter from articles is actually a good idea. I even tried postlight’s Mercury parser. But I just couldn’t get it to work. I also like the that feedi’s “frequency buckets” idea. Sometimes frequency is more important that chronology. But I’m not savvy enough to install it on my machine. I’ll give it a try once there’s a docker image or something.