I've tried to switch from Feedly to a self-hosted solution last month, and tested some of the different open-source options.

Different UIs aside, one of the issues I kept having was that some of my feeds wouldn't load because sites now have a bot/scrapping/AI protection in place (Cloudflare, Anubis, etc), breaking RSS readers. And that was with a residential IP, it was even worse if I routed traffic via a popular VPS or VPN provider.

I guess this will affect some users more than others depending on what we subscribe to, but I decided to keep using Feedly (for now at least).

I tried going back to Thunderbird for RSS recently just to get away from bloated web readers. The fact that you can use standard email rules to filter out high-volume noise is actually amazing. You can just auto-archive posts based on regex or keywords.

But the lack of simple cross-device sync killed the experiment for me. If you read a few articles on your phone while commuting, your desktop client has no idea when you get home. It is a great setup if you only ever consume news at one desk, but I ended up just sticking with Miniflux so my unread counts stay sane.

I like Miniflux becuase it is easy to run and keeps a centralized status if you have multiple devices. I guess if Thunderbird supported the Fever protocol you could use them together unless there is some other method I'm not aware of?

I installed Thunderbird for the first time today, and removed it about an hour later. It sat there idle chewing up 67% of a CPU core.

> Thunderbird delivers RSS feed items the same way as email, so you can apply filters to mark them as "read"

This is a good idea. I use Thunderbird only for a small number of feeds I want to read every post from. I used to also use a separate feed reader for my "river of news", but eventually I stopped looking at that and just loadded hackernews or reddit when I wanted a distraction. But I might try Thunderbird for more feeds and just auto-mark most of them as read so I can browse at my leisure.

This may be a good alternative to the various web-based services, which suffer from various limitations (cost money, display ads, limited number of feeds, limited retention, annoying features you don't want, etc). The email-style user interface is also familiar, and you can set up filters to ignore or star certain stories.

Assuming you don't need syncing across devices, the main drawback to self-hosting is that it only receives updates while your PC is switched on. Some feeds update often enough that you'll miss stories if you don't grab them multiple times per day.

Yes I have been doing this for years. I also have my gmail account plumbed in so I have a local copy of my emails; easy archiving. And yes I manually copy my opml changes across devices and I like it!

I built an RSS reader and just launched the beta: https://aggly.com Interested in any feedback.

I use Thunderbird to consume the changelog of my very own software. I can confirm, it works great! I get always notified accurately when something changed I changed.

I still perfer the TT-RSS, now on github without Fox (The dev most people had issues with).

The android app isn't maintained at the moment but it's still one of the best rss apps I have ever used

The issue I have with Thunderbird and RSS is that there's no good way to do a show me the unread only and keep the feed folders. You can do a search folder or show unread folders but that affects mail too.

Or I don't know how

The built-in matrix and irc client is pretty great too, hope they can keep building out these features. I donate every year to projects I use, and TB was among them this year.

Doesn't opera/vivaldi also have built-in rss client, bit torrent client, e-mail client and irc client? Seems like a better way to have everting of this kind in one place. I wouldn't want to mix my emails with rss, that makes little sense to me.

> and it’s honestly quite great. As opposed to it not honestly being great, which if true, would kind of defeat the point of writing this post

Well I, for one, find the honesty refreshing.

Someone else mentioned Miniflux, which I've been testing for a few weeks on a local, tailscale-connected debian box. I really like it so far, with only a few minor complaints. It seems to embrace Dave Winer’s "river of news" idea that the author mentions. When I open my Miniflux homepage, I see the latest posts and I'm not distracted by older posts that I might not be concerned about.

That said, I categorize my feeds and treat the categories differently. Dev/design/DIY -- I tend to read all/most of it.

Man discovers long-available UI in common app, which he has not noticed before! News at 11!