I’ve been using Feedbin since 2008 after moving there from Feedly. Back then, Feedly had become somehow annoying with lots of integrations that I actually didn’t care about. This is not the reason why I decided to look at alternative RSS aggregators this time. I really like Feedbin and haven’t had any real problems with it ever. At the same time, RSS aggregation just feels like something that I could solve for myself with a little service running on one of the servers I already have for other things.
So I gathered a couple of options:
- TinyTiny RSS: Written in PHP
- FreshRSS: Also written in PHP…
- Miniflux: Finally something not written in PHP :D
- commafeed: And a Java implementation
Even with Docker I don’t want to have to deal with PHP when I can avoid it. Same with Java plus I’m actually looking for something really lightweight. So I went with Miniflux for now which is as minimal as it gets.
Still, the interface offers exactly what I want: A list of unread items from all my feeds and the option to only see those of a specific feed. Combined with good keyboard shortcuts I’ve so far not even opened Reeder on my phone since starting to use Miniflux.
It also offers tons of things that I haven’t used yet like …
- Scraper rules for extracting the actual post content from a website using CSS selectors
- Entry filtering rules which would allow me to skip for instance those articles on Wired.com that are just discount codes/advertisements.
- Webhook support for specific feeds so that I could trigger other services from them.
The first week with Miniflux has been quite pleasant. So far it looks like it does exactly what I want! As a side-effect of the migration, I also found tons of feeds that were not working or that I wasn’t interested in anymore 😅
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Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂