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 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?
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
Both of these comments are needlessly snarky. Although it is true that the RSS capability of Thunderbird has been around for quite a while, I enjoy articles that simply reflect the author's discovery or use case.
Like you, I was consuming RSS through Thunderbird around that time as well and thought it was really good. I have since moved to something else(many times) as my needs have changed.
In the spirit of HN, the poster maybe wanted a discussion of how the use of RSS has declined and walled gardens took its place which is not good for the longevity and usefulness of knowledge.
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).
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