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Story
The RSS feed reader landscape
I still miss Google Reader. I loved the social aspects, where I could repost my favorite articles (with comments about them), and friends could easily subscribe to my feed and comment on my shares. It was a really great social network for sharing blog posts and articles. I credit the demise of Google Reader with a lot of the downfall of the Old Web.

Since then, social sharing platforms are motivated to keep you on their platform. I recently ran an experiment on Facebook, where I posted a link to a content creator's video on YouTube with a lot of my thoughts about it.

I then downloaded the same video from YouTube and uploaded it to Facebook (this particular creator didn't upload his content to Facebook directly), and posted the exact same text content (but this time, hid the link the the source video in a comment).

The post where I downloaded + reposted the video got about 1000x more views than the one where I linked to the source.

On top of that, Facebook will often hide the link to the source video unless I click "Show all comments" (rather than the default "Show most relevant").

Facebook deprioritizes (shadowbans?) posts that link off of their platform, and it starts feeling like a stagnant pond. It's frustrating that it's difficult to share insightful blog posts on that platform, and I'm feeling pretty done with it.

Getting a good RSS reader isn't the part that I'm looking for -- I want the easy social aspect that Google Reader and Google+ gave me.

I used https://www.theoldreader.com/en/ for a long time before giving up on RSS. At the time it was the most similar to Google's.
> Facebook deprioritizes (shadowbans?) posts that link off of their platform

That tells you that's not what it's for. It would be like posting your resume on FB and LinkedIn and then pointing out that FB led to fewer job offers than LinkedIn. Different platforms, different purposes.

Have you tried Feedly or Inoreader or Flipboard or The Old Reader or any other RSS services that popped up after Google Reader was killed?

  • asdff
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I suppose you could make your own "meta" rss feed today, where you repost interesting articles to this feed, wrapped in your comments.
Newsblur has a similar social feature
  • flkiwi
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Newsboat + miniflux is an excellent combination if you're CLI-addicted but want to access feeds from multiple devices.

For all the (justifiable) concern about the death of RSS, we have a glut of excellent options for consuming content through RSS. But I'm still sour about the Reeder redesign. At least the dev was transparent about building the tool he wanted to use but, ugh, it's barely in the same market as the others now.

If you're in the Apple ecosystem (Mac, iPhone) NetNewsWire is an absolute delight. It's not a commercial product any more, Brent Simmons runs it as a (very serious) passion project. Here's a recent post by him explaining part of his philosophy for it: https://inessential.com/2025/10/04/why-netnewswire-is-not-we...

Crucially, it syncs feed read state between my laptop and phone.

  • JLO64
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> Crucially, it syncs feed read state between my laptop and phone.

This is via iCloud and only works for iPhones/Macs. What’s great though is that NetNewsWire also supports RSS feed aggregators (I personally use FreshRSS) so that you can sync RSS read status over all your devices, even non Apple ones!

I’ve been tempted over the years to switch to other RSS apps, but this feature is what keeps me using NetNewsWire.

  • dewey
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I use https://miniflux.app and use that to sync NetNewsWire across my devices and across RSS readers. I'm using Reeder on my iPad, Miniflux on the web and sometimes NetNewsWire on my Mac.
I used Reeder for a year, but switched to Miniflux because I wanted an RSS reader that could be used outside of my Apple devices. I do miss having a mobile app of my reader, since Miniflux can sometimes be hard to navigate on a mobile device. I never seriously considered using multiple readers until now. Thanks for the accidental recommendation.
I have used NetNewsWire since 2003.

Really.

It’s flawless. It just works. There are no gimmicks, there is no weird effort to gamify it into a social media play, it’s just a user-focused news reader. And that’s great.

+1 I use NetNewsWire as well.

In addition to sync by iCloud, you can also sync with a third-party aggregator (BazQux, Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader, NewsBlur, The Old Reader, or FreshRSS). This can be a good option if you sometimes need access from a non-Apple device.

+1 for NetNewsWire, truly delightful. I wish there was a Linux version.
I'll just shill my own feed reader here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re...

It currently only runs in Firefox but if anyone is interested, I'll Port it to Chrome since it now supports a sidebar interface.

I made this because I wanted to have feeds show up where I read them, in the browser, and I wanted it on my own device so nobody else controls it. No hosting, no payment, just a simple tool that lets me control what I read.

Bonus: if you try it you'll likely increase the global usage by double digits ;)

This is a nice overview but is also obviously content marketing for Lighthouse, which, fine.

I use Feedly, and generally like it, but the issue with RSS has very little to do with reader front ends and largely to do with how a lot of people don't publish full articles on RSS, images don't work, etc. The demo images of all the readers are like best case scenario - most non-personal sites only publish a paragraph or two, if that, making the reader more of a link aggregator.

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> very little to do with reader front ends and largely to do with how a lot of people don't publish full articles on RSS, images don't work, etc.

That's exactly what some of the front ends help resolve - they parse the link to get the full content, some even for sites requiring login.

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I use feedly because it's where I landed after GReader; I don't love it, but it has worked continually without bothering me enough to think about it.

But one day I want to look into alternatives, and the number one thing in my wishlist is to be able to scrap sites that crop the full article in the feed. Going from the RSS client to the browser to the reader mode in the browser is such an absurd friction.

Edit: Well, after 12 years, that day ended up being today. I found a client called FeedMe that syncs with Feedly and can load the full article inside the client. It also has some other features that I was looking for, like filters. There might be more clients like that, but this is the first I found. I shouldn't have been so lazy all this time.

Some readers can download the full article. I tried Miniflux a while back I think that one supports it.
  • dewey
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It definitely does, I use it all the time.
NetNewsWire is great, and the developer is just in it for the love of the game and the open web.

https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire/blob/main/T...

Going to shill for Feedbin (https://feedbin.com). I switched to this in 2012 when Reader blew up and it has remained a consistently excellent product since then.

I use the web client, and on iOS I use Reeder app to access Feedbin. Ben even published the a Feedbin API¹, which I wrote a Feedbin client for vintage computers (I called Mosaicbin)². I even use it for YouTube subs as of this year and it ingests them perfectly (and can filter Shorts).

I'm still on the original pricing but would happily pay $5/mo current price if it came to that. It's a product that would leave a huge void in my life if it ever disappeared.

¹ - https://github.com/feedbin/feedbin-api

² - https://github.com/jonpurdy/mosaicbin

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I second this recommendation!

I joined later than you: May 2013. If it really was 2012 when Google Reader blew up, I can't remember what I used before finding Feedbin. Maybe Feedly, maybe something else that came and went or maybe even a local reader...

For Android users, I recommend "Capy Reader" as a client.

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Unless I misunderstand, it also misses that Newsblur is open source and can be self hosted https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
They also have a free tier for the hosted version that is pretty generous (64 sites). I used the free hosted version for years after Reader went away and only upgraded as a way to support software that I use and enjoy regularly.
I'm happy to just use Feedly.

Keeps my feeds in sync between the mobile app and the web site, has pretty good keyboard shortcuts, mostly just gets out of the way, doesn't have ads I'm not sure what else I'd need

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I've been using Feedbin basically since Google Reader died. There are many feedbin compatible clients.

I'd probably honestly like to move to something self-hosted, but afaik there is no way to export the read status of individual feed items. OPML is just a list of feeds and their URLs, not their individual item history.

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I doubt this actually exists, but does anyone know of an RSS reader that is cross platform, open source, and can sync between multiple devices via syncthing?

I already sync notes, e-books, etc, via syncthing on Android and Linux. RSS is one place where I have yet to find an option.

Okay this is a thinly veiled ad for Lighthouse, and a clever attempt at getting backlinks, SEO value, etc.

So my real question is what is the value of Lighthouse compared to Feedly or Inoreader?

When Google Reader closed I started using The Old Reader and then after 3 or 4 years jumped to Inoreader.

I've been using it since then without paying anything and it works ok.

I really hope sites continue their RSS feeds. It seems like less and less of them have them available or don’t care to keep them updated.
  • 6510
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You can usually find a feed in google. Some people make feeds by crawling sites.
Yes, like 95% of commenters here, I also have an RSS reader. Mine is kinda social (you can follow people and see their subscriptions in your feed), and also has full-text search and “related” recommendations. I also curate and grow a directory of human-written personal blogs: https://minifeed.net

Due to the nature of the medium, the majority of blogs in the directory and technical.

This is cool — I love it-- the layout and list of the people. Your OMPL list is awesome. I am also working in a similar direction. Right now, I am following only a few people in my RSS feed, so your list is really helpful.
A bit of a self-promotion, but relevant. I've been working on a TUI feed reader that stores all articles locally in Markdown in a filesystem structure, similar to what Obsidian does, if anyone's interested: https://github.com/CrociDB/bulletty
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Article feels AI generated and misses some big ones. Given that this is advertising for their product, I don’t feel like this is actually useful (meaning unbiased and comprehensive) content for anyone who wants to figure out what RSS reader fits their needs.
FeedFlow (all platforms and can be synced over freshRSS) https://github.com/prof18/feed-flow

Would be cool if lawnchair for android could integrate RSS as news feed..

Some links

https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS

https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds

My problem with most RSS do not have great search. With 500+ sources this can become problem.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - my own project

I’ll add https://github.com/stringer-rss/stringer to the self-hosted list. It is my reader of choice since I think over ten years. Never had the feeling of looking for another one.
Here is my "rss reader" https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/news/

I wanted to have a list of latest posts of blogs I follow and that I can access it quickly from both PC and mobile phone without any signing in. Then I decided to do it myself like that. There is a github workflow that runs automatically every 6 hours and updates that page.

I opened your page. 5 posts by Simon Willison and 8 by other authors. A comment by Simon Willison underneath this comment as well (now the top comment on the thread).

Simon's spam game is CRAZY. There's a million blogs out there but over half of the posts on your reader are him. Why bother? You can't get away from him here or on lobsters even if you want to -- why further flood your subscriptions with his slop?

I don't understand how he has such a grip on you people. The Andrew Tate of AI bros.

I see, but yes and no. He is maybe the most active among them, but for that precise reason (I have it from the beginning, not after I stared reading his blog :)) I show only last 5 posts of each blog, to not pollute that list. This way everyone has a chance to stay longer on that list.
FreshRSS is so good. Using it for webscraping and syncing with my android app.
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Here is a terminal based reader that I recently created as an alternative to newsboat https://github.com/jarv/newsgoat

It has some features that I felt was missing from the terminal based readers out there already.

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This just reminded me of Teletext!
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I used Feeder on my Android phone for the longest time. Recently set up a NixOS server and enabled FreshRSS on it, with FocusReader as the Android client. It is very nice to manage feeds on a server and have the read/unread status sync across devices.

If you have only used device-local readers before and have a server to spare, I recommend at least trying it!

I have freshrss on a VPS and use the web interface as my client on computers and my phone. Is FocusReader a big upgrade over the native web experience?
TIL everyone on HN has built an RSS reader.
I recently enabled RSS for my own blog¹ and found it very frustrating getting the images/thumbs to display properly. The reason it was frustrating is the aggressive caching by the RSS readers. I had to debug it on a bunch of different readers, then once it was finally working change the URL of my feed to force them all to refresh.

The RSS feeds are surprisingly non-standardized for the media content extensions, even a simple thumbnail.

[1] https://www.jasonthorsness.com at https://www.jasonthorsness.com/rss.xml

RSS specifically or does the Atom standard also fail?
I've been a big fan of Iconfactory's Tapestry for a while now. It supports RSS, plus a bunch of custom connectors for non-RSS things. You could write your own to pull down whatever random thing you wanted, like GitHub Actions outputs or screenshots of your home webcam.
I don't know if it's permanently dead or not but I really like QuiteRSS:

https://github.com/QuiteRSS/quiterss

Last update was 4 years ago; I don't know if this means the project is dead or merely "done." One of the last features added was the ability to share a news item to Hacker News:

https://github.com/QuiteRSS/quiterss/issues/1084#issue-33248...

I have used this app on Windows and macOS; I've installed it on Linux but I don't do daily work on Linux so I don't know if it's stable there or not.

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Check on RSSGuard, I checked a few weeks ago after another reccomendation here, and the dev was working on importing the QuiteRSS sqlite db.

It seems he has already completed it? I'll try to migrate this weekend then https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard/issues/1707#issueco...

Big fan of https://github.com/synzen/MonitoRSS, not mentioned in the article. I self host at home and it sends feed updates to my own Discord server. I appreciate the customization for how the feed notification appear in Discord.
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Claude Code built me a custom RSS feed reader in just an hour or so. I wanted a simple list of unread posts, which would be auto-deleted when I clicked on them to read them. It took less than 24 hours to go from "ok I'll try to make this" to having it up and running "in production" on my home server.

AI could be a real game changer for anyone who runs their own server or homelab. If you can't find a reader you like, just make one! It's not that hard these days.

The author of Reeder has another RSS app that’s focused on recipes called Mela [1]. I’ve been using Reeder (the one-time payment version) and Mela for years and highly recommend both.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mela-recipe-manager/id15484660...

If you are in the Apple ecosystem I recommend News Explorer. It has a very nice interface and it syncs with your iCloud. It is a one-time payment of $4.99.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/news-explorer/id1032668306

no mention of rss via email?

https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email https://pypi.org/project/rss2email/

i have been using this for 20 years already. by now my own version has accumulated a few custom patches. but the original it is still under active development/support. some day i need to submit my changes upstream.

I have my own custom perl script which basically does the same which I've been using for probably a similar amount of time. Never used a dedicated RSS reader. My feeds just get turned into email and dropped into the appropriate folder thanks to my sieve filters. Can read/delete things from any of my email clients. Absolutely no need for a dedicated RSS reader.
If you're looking for an on-device terminal feed reader, here's mine: https://github.com/ckampfe/russ

Some folks seem to like it.

Liferea looks too old, has a lot of bugs... But man that thing makes me happy, just headlines and click what I want to read.
> A deep dive

can't we just call things "A thorough examination / analysis" anymore?

It's content marketing.
Commafeed is also hosted at commafeed.com
There's very few things an AI agent can easier make than an rss reader. Just do it, customize it to your liking and finished...
I built an RSS reader in 2005. I never figured out how to 100% reliably detect already downloaded articles.
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No tt-rss? Weird.
tt-rss was discontinued a few days ago: https://community.tt-rss.org/t/the-end-of-tt-rss-org/7164
I just made a python script that I keep running that updates when there is a new post from one of my feeds. Feed list is stored locally.
You should post the repo/gist
Try this too https://fraidyc.at/
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I was wondering why Tiny Tiny RSS was missing as that's what I've been using for the last 10+ years. At the bottom of the article there's the explanation:

> On October 3rd the maintainer announced that he's going to stop working on it, and will remove all infrastructure on November 1st. Forks of the project with other maintainers may pop up, but at the moment it's too soon to tell what the future of Tiny Tiny RSS will be.

Various discussions around here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45466224

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45468320

I would like an headless RSS feed aggregator that stores (and categorizes?) feeds and articles in a DB and exposes a rich API.
Miniflux is close, it has a minimal ui, but it also has a full api.

I've been using it for a few years and it's pretty great.

yarr is a fantastic selfhosted reader
Isn't this just marketing AI slop? There is no real structure, several readers are described with more details, others aren't. At the end there is an ad for Lighthouse.
  • dewey
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Many links shared on HN are content marketing for various companies. In this case it's a good start for a discussion and sharing RSS tool that are not listed on that list.
I was looking into this a few days ago, but was having a hard time finding an RSS reader that was desktop software and handled Youtube feeds. I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t tied to a SaaS or required hosting online.
If you're on iOS or MacOS I can highly recommend NetNewsWire (https://netnewswire.com/).
Linux :/ sorry…
Seconded. I've been using NetNewsWire for a couple of decades, and it does the unglamorous job of displaying feeds without ads, nags, or feature churn.
What readers have you tried? What do you mean by "handled YouTube feeds". YouTube feeds just work as far as I am aware, they are fairly regular feeds. Are you expecting something in particular?
Requirements:

- Linux support

- doesn’t make me click a link and load the video in the browser, but plays in app

Akregator on KDE Plasma doesn’t support this, but you’d think “video/podcast” support would be a feature listed in the bullets of the feed reader software. A lot of the readers I looked at did not have it listed on a quick glance.

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You can set this up today with newsboat, if you are fine with writing a small helper script that will parse browsing links for "youtube" string and open them directly in mpv. There are a bunch of examples of these sorts of scripts on peoples githubs where they already went through the trouble of writing regex for video and image file links (beyond just youtube) for you. You then add a line in the newsboat config file to set the default browser to your helper script.

I extended one to include opening rss subscribed reddit links in rtv in my terminal window, for example.

Thunderbird handles youtube feeds just fine.
Happy daily user of FeedBro in Firefox here. I've been using it for 3 years and it's exactly what I expect it to be. It just goes.
Another free one http://gitHub.com/lallassu/gorss :)
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> Their main purpose is enabling their users to consume content

Here we go again... no, "consume content" is what the commercial social networks want you to do so you stick around until the next ad break. (Maybe even what a commercial SaaS RSS reader wants you to do so you pay the next bill.)

I use RSS specifically to get away from generic "content". Instead I read to learn things, and to explore opoinions I might not otherwise come in contact with, and to socialise with other people.

"Everything Is Content Now" by Patrick (H) Willems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAtbFwzZp6Y

It bugs me too when actual humans adopt soulless management-speak about "content" traveling from "producer" to "consumer." (The words don't even make sense: when you consume food, it's gone; when you observe text, an image, or video, it's still there.) I use RSS to keep up with other people who "emit content" at irregular intervals.