Switching feed readers

I recently switched my RSS/Atom feed reader away from Tiny Tiny RSS and its companion Android app. I had fallen behind on upgrades on the server, and the app had been removed from F-Droid, so I needed to do something. I had set up Tiny Tiny RSS in 2017, so it was time for a fresh start.

I wanted a similar setup: a server that would maintain track of my subscriptions, articles and (un)read status, and then an Android app with a good UI and offline support. I do most of my feed reading on my phone these days, so I'm a bit more picky on that side.

Rachel (by the bay) recently praised the FreshRSS developers, so that was the first thing I tried out. And it worked...fine? I set up a container with podman, hooked it up to a MariaDB database (also in a container), and imported all my feeds.

Mostly for due dilligence, I tried out Miniflux next. It only supports postgres, which knocked it down a peg for me since I prefer MariaDB. I was really impressed with its feature to download content from the link instead of what's in the feed to "fix" feeds that truncate content.

Then I learned that FreshRSS has the same feature, just a little less automatic! FreshRSS requires you to manually enter a CSS selector, which so far has just been pretty trivial since it's either article or main. It also supports manual feed construction using XPath, which seems really cool, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

On my phone, I evaluated multiple apps: Capy Reader, Readrops and Flux News.

The main limitation I encountered with Readrops was not having a preview or snippet when viewing all the articles (example). I also found the "estimated reading time" indicators kind of patronizing with no way to disable them.

As far as I could tell, Flux News didn't have any support for offline reading.

I like Capy Reader, it's a clean UI that's similar enough to what I had with Tiny Tiny RSS. FreshRSS worked right away, but I couldn't get it to connect to Miniflux over the Google Reader API. I'm pretty sure it's a me problem, since others are using it with Miniflux just fine.

In any case, I tried out FreshRSS+Capy Reader for a week, and while I still need a bit more time to get used to it, I think it will meet my feed reading needs. So yesterday, after taking a backup, I shutdown my Tiny Tiny RSS server after more than 8 years in service 🫡. Here's to 8 more years of feed reading with FreshRSS and Capy Reader!