I have used FreshRSS before but I was always annoyed that some sites don’t provide RSS feeds and that even if they provide feeds they don’t provide the whole content through it and only a preview.
What do you recommend for the perfect RSS setup? What are you using? Which app are you using to read them?
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TLDR: Just using an app on your laptop with good filters (newsbeuter!) might be all you need.
IMHO, RSS readers without decent filters are useless. If you are going to subscribe to even 10, 20 feeds, you will be flooded with articles and have no chance to go through them all. Unfortunately, that already removes 95% of readers from the options.
A long time ago, I had a TinyTinyRSS setup running. TTRSS offers amazing filters and sorting mechanisms, which made it stand out. For example, I subscribed to several dozens of job recruiting feeds and filtered out everything that didn’t match. You could also add new filters easily. So if you see many job posts for “Twist dancer” and that is not your thing, you can just filter them out and it gets better over time.
At some point though, TTRSS changed their deployment setup, I think to docker at the time, and I couldn’t be bothered reading up how to set it up back then. Something like that. I also heard that the developer is a Nazi, but this may well be wrong. Both together were somehow enough for me though to drop it and I left the RSS game for a while.
A few months ago I started again, but this time just on my laptop. Turns out, the main advantage of a server-based version is that you can read stuff on mobile, which I don’t do so much anyway. So first I tried Liferea, which kind of worked but I couldn’t wrap my head around the filter mechanism. It’s supposed to work, but I tried to figure out which part of the code in which exact format to put where exactly. Documentation and error logs suck, and after suffering for 2-3 hours I left it be. Turns out though, Liferea is mostly just a GUI for newsbeuter, and that is where I am now. The filter language is awkward, especially if you have an older version that doesn’t support pretty coding yet (I use Debian, btw). But it works and I’m happy with it now!
Other than that, although a bit beside your question: Many websites don’t bother including RSS feeds anymore these days, or even removed them to make people look at their ad infested websites. Whichever reader you pick, make sure it easily supports custom RSS feeds. I wrote a little Python script using BeautifulSoup and FeedGenerator to make my own feeds in such cases and newsbeuter can include them easily. There is also this project for that job:
https://git.sr.ht/~ghost08/ratt
but I didn’t look into it in detail.
When did you last use FreshRSS? It now supports creation of custom feeds using XPath scraping. ie. turn a website into a full RSS feed.
Does this work for reddit posts too - including the comments in the feed?
You could probably make it work, but comments could be difficult to include.
Thanks for the reply. Even viewing comments you mean? I can already add posts/feeds directly to freshrss, it must doesn’t show the comments. I guess I can just update and try. I didn’t know this feature existed!
Keep using FreshRSS, just deploy something like fivefilters-full-text-rss-docker alongside it, to get full text RSS feeds from websites, that don’t provide them. If you don’t want to self-host, there’s morss.it. Chris Titus Tech once made a few videos about this:
https://invidious.fi/watch?v=nxV0CPNeFxY
https://invidious.fi/watch?v=Y1Ho_RrF_9II use miniflux. To read the feed I use Flux News on android. I don’t read the whole feed in the reader, but open the link
I think miniflux supports downloading the source, but I had to do it manually each time when I tried
