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?
For me the main point is, syncronization. Point is I want to read on my phone, or if i go to another computer catch up on it. If I set up a seperate RSS reader on each, then I’d have to figure out what’s read and what’s not. Honestly that’s a feature that google reader really had me spoiled in, I loved being able to use a work computer, browse through my rss feeds, star articles that I thought I may want to come back to, go home look at the starred ones and then go back.
Then google reader shut down, and I wanted to be able to do the same again, while also not being vulnerable to another shut down.
Then google reader shut down, and I wanted to be able to do the same again, while also not being vulnerable to another shut down
still using Feedly since the Reader shutdown and it’s still going strong
Same for me: I read on both laptop and phone so sync is important
Because you don’t want your phone connecting to 200 servers every hour. And to sync across devices.
First of all, many of us used Google Reader and Google shutting that down totally destroyed my trust in Google and other companies. My reader is critical infrastructure for me and I do not want some random company to screw me again. I think that many others experienced losing a valuable tool and that is why there are so many selfhosted RSS readers out there.
I can access my RSS feeds on multiple devices without losing track of what I’ve already read.
Pardon my ignorance but isn’t that exactly what Inoreader and Feedly do?
Google reader used to to it too. Then it died.
I won’t get hurt like thst again.
Yes because they have a server
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.
Telemetry is one reason.
Not having to worry about the service shutting down (Google Reader) is another.
Synced read status is a common one as well.
You may also use it in combination with another service to create RSS feeds for sites that dont have one.
Honestly having it not just get killed like Google Reader is a big chunk of the userbase.
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.
For me, it is because I don’t want to leave my power hungry desktop running 24/7 to just capture feeds… I already self host, so I let that do the fetching on a schedule, then my rss client just fetches from my server
