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.

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goku12 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

There is an open source service named gpodder.net (web app, not the client app) that does this for podcasts. It doesn't just sync post read status, it can also sync added podcast feeds across supported clients on all devices.

Since podcasts are based on RSS feeds, this shows that what you seek is possible with regular feeds too. I don't know yet how gpodder does it, but that should be easy enough to find out because the web app seems to have good documentation in addition to being open source.

However, looking at the RSS and Atom feed formats, they seem to include some variation of a uuid per story. This is like message-ids in emails and should be useful in cross-device post status sync. This could be what gpodder uses for sync. A similar service for regular feeds would be easy enough to make. But it would need support across feed readers too, like how several podcast clients support gpodder.

> 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'm considering deploying an aggregator too. So I'm curious. What made you settle with miniflux?

	▲	Fluorescence an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> gpodder.net Not sure quite what's going on with that project but when I looked - gpodder.net was a subscription service and the foss project was somewhat hidden and renamed as mygpo. Felt a bit suss and abandoned although I guess an rss server could just be "done". There is also opodsync that seems to be a bit more alive and popular and says it's gpodder compatible. Not tried it though. My enthusiasm to self-host my podcast/rss feed was killed dead when I gave nextcloud another go since it can apparently do this. Every few years I set it up having forgotten that the last time I did, I swore to never touch it again. I can't believe it's still such a bad experience.

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upofadown 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I sync up my newsboat feed reader with syncthing so I am up to date on multiple devices. I wonder if Thunderbird could be made to work in the same way...

	▲	abc123abc123 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I use newsraft. It's the Donald Trump of rss readers! Quick, portable, easily scriptable. In short... excellent!

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pabs3 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thunderbird is basically a web reader already though right? Its based on HTML and JS mostly.

	▲	small_scombrus 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		IIRC Thunderbird is a fork of Firefox, so it can do all of the web things your heart desires