content/posts/freshrss/index.md

   1 ---
   2 title: "Software Review: FreshRSS"
   3 date: 2024-06-08T12:14:37+02:00
   4 summary: About RSS, its issues and my solution of choice for them.
   5 ---
   6 Most RSS users start off with desktop readers such as Newsboat or Akregator in
   7 order to keep things simple. However, due to certain drawbacks of this approach
   8 *(which I will talk about below)* I have looked for an aggregator I can install
   9 on my VPS and use as such. After a bit of research, I have decided to go with
  10 [FreshRSS](https://freshrss.org/) and here I'll explain why I decided to ditch
  11 Akregator in the first place and why I chose FreshRSS.
  12
  13 ## What even is RSS?
  14 *If you're already initiated on this subject, feel free to skip to the next
  15 section.*
  16
  17 A practically universal use case for the Internet is reading various blogs and
  18 news. However, as your number of followed blog and news sites builds up, going
  19 through all of them looking for new content becomes a serious chore. To make
  20 things worse, many (generally news) sites are becoming increasingly bloated.
  21 *(Not just technologically, but also with garbage content!)*
  22
  23 RSS solves these issues beautifully. The idea is that each site has an XML
  24 document (called an **RSS feed**, or **feed** for short) which contains a list
  25 of the N latest posts on that website. You can add an arbitrary number of these
  26 feeds into your reader and it will automatically sync these at a specified
  27 interval, optionally notifying you of new content. This removes the chore of
  28 having to go through your followed sites manually, but it also works around the
  29 technological bloat issue as the feeds can only contain plain text or *(more
  30 common and still reasonable)* plain HTML. Finally, low-quality content can be
  31 much more easily ignored or straight up filtered from your reader.
  32
  33 Unfortunately, RSS has declined since its golden age in the 2000's with [Firefox
  34 dropping its own
  35 reader](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacements-firefox)
  36 and many people forgetting about RSS, however it persists on many sites (even
  37 big ones) and other readers continue to be actively developed.
  38
  39 ## What's the problem with traditional readers?
  40
  41 If you consume your feeds on multiple devices *(as most people, me included,
  42 probably do)* with a traditional reader, your feeds and other info on them (such
  43 as read and important markers) will not sync. Besides that, you might lose
  44 articles on high-volume feeds if you do not open your feed reader for a while
  45 (which might be just a few days) and the feed has a sufficiently low N.
  46
  47 The solution to these problems is to run your aggregator on a server. There
  48 exist public ones, but a far better solution would be to host your own. This is
  49 where FreshRSS comes in.
  50
  51 ## How to install it?
  52
  53 If you have Docker Compose, put something like this into a `docker-compose.yml`:
  54 ```yaml
  55 version: "3.8"
  56
  57 volumes:
  58   data:
  59   extensions:
  60
  61 services:
  62   freshrss:
  63     image: freshrss/freshrss:latest
  64     container_name: freshrss
  65     hostname: freshrss
  66     restart: unless-stopped
  67     ports:
  68       - "8181:80"
  69     logging:
  70       options:
  71         max-size: 10m
  72     volumes:
  73       - data:/var/www/FreshRSS/data
  74       - extensions:/var/www/FreshRSS/extensions
  75     environment:
  76       TZ: Europe/Zagreb
  77       CRON_MIN: '3,33'
  78 ```
  79 Then, configure your web server to point a subdomain or path to the respective
  80 port. Open the subdomain or path in your browser, do the initial setup and
  81 you're done. Add a few categories and feeds, then go through the settings and
  82 configure everything to your wishes.
  83
  84 Since FreshRSS is a PWA, you may "install" it using a Chromium-based browser
  85 *(which I do on Android)* or through the **Web Apps** program on a Linux Mint
  86 system.
  87
  88 ## How does it feel to use? Should I use it?
  89
  90 There's not that much to say. Adding feeds is as simple as on a traditional
  91 reader, all my feeds and starred articles sync between devices *(strictly
  92 speaking, they do not, but are fetched from the server)* and it overall behaves
  93 pretty much just like Akregator did excluding the issues.
  94
  95 If you only read feeds on one device and don't care about losing articles from
  96 big news sites here and there, you should probably stick with a traditional
  97 reader as that is obviously less complicated, probably a bit more secure, allows
  98 offline reading and so on. However, if your RSS experience is affected by one of
  99 the aforementioned issues, I can highly recommend FreshRSS as it's relatively
 100 simple to set up and does not otherwise try to be radically different just for
 101 the sake of it.