For quite some time, I have wanted to rely less on algorithmically curated feeds. The daily scroll through YouTube, Substack, or LinkedIn felt less like discovery and more like dopamine mining. I wanted a system that delivered interesting content to satisfy my curiosity, without platforms whose best interest is to have me glued to them. These days, finding such a platform is tough. Even if one exists now, there's no guarantee it won't eventually mimic the ones I wanted to get away from.
I wanted a system where I subscribe directly to creators or communities sharing content I like. That's exactly what a feed reader does. It pulls content chronologically from blogs and sites that support RSS/Atom feeds, with no middleman filtering or recommending.
There are a few feed reader platforms, but I wanted to have full data ownership and more control over the system. This is why I decided to self-host FreshRSS, an open-source feed aggregator and reader, on my homelab running on a mini-PC. This also has the added advantage of being resilient compared to an online service which may stop existing for reasons beyond my control.
Feed sources
Rather than relying on algorithms of platforms to decide which content they want to show me, I now subscribe to content from sources where I have found interesting writings before. I categorize the content sources broadly into the following:
- Communities: There's many interesting posts being shared on communities like Hacker News RSS, Lobsters, Lemmy. I started by directly subscribing to their content RSS feed. But the number of posts was overwhelming. So I now use hnrss.com and upvote-rss to get only the top posts from them.
- Personal Blogs: If a post catches my eye, I check the author’s site and subscribe to their personal RSS feed if they have other content that I also find interesting.
- Substack: I subscribe to a creator's publication directly by using their Substack URL.
- Websites without RSS: Not all websites provide RSS/Atom feeds. Luckily, there's an open-source and self-hostable project called RSSHub which can generate RSS feeds for many popular websites. It acts as a bridge between my FreshRSS instance and those websites. It also has a browser extension companion: RSSHub-Radar to easily find and subscribe to RSS feeds.
- Newsletters: Previously, I had subscribed to many newsletters on my personal email. This made my email inbox messy and it felt like a chore to go and read there. I now use Kill the Newsletter! which provides an email address to subscribe to these newsletters. It generates an Atom feed which I can subscribe to in FreshRSS. This has the benefit of keeping my inbox clean and also consolidating all my reading into a single application.
- Youtube Channels: Yes, I can directly subscribe to Youtube channels from FreshRSS and get any new uploads from the channel directly into FreshRSS.
Since FreshRSS is an aggregator, I don't necessarily need to use the FreshRSS interface to access my feed. There are many applications for different platforms which can use FreshRSS as the source for the feeds. I use the Readrops app on my phone. I have occasionally used the NetNewsWire app on MacOS.
Filtering my feed
Some newsletters I subscribe to, like those covering AI news, have a short shelf life. If I haven't read them within a month, the content is usually stale and there is little point in me reading them. That's why I've set up the -pubdate:P30D filter to automatically mark them as read.
FreshRSS also allows me to automatically mark incoming content as read if it matches some conditions that I set. For example: I am following a Youtube channel for content on Go programming language. But the creator also posts videos on Rust, which I am not interested in at the moment. So I've set a filter -intitle:" Rust:" for the channel which automatically marks videos that have " Rust" in the title as read so it doesn't show up on my feed.
Despite these filters, I have a lot of unread posts in FreshRSS. I initially felt the "phantom obligation" to reach "inbox zero" with my feeds. Now, I accept that most of those articles are timeless. They'll still be valuable whenver I get to them, so there's no need to rush.
Extending and customizing FreshRSS
FreshRSS is not the only self-hostable feed aggregator. The main reason I chose it is because of its support for extensions which allows for augmenting its functionality. The ones I find useful are:
- Youlag: Better interface for Youtube videos than the default view
- Af_Readability: Inlines full article content for sites that only show excerpts in feeds.
- Karakeep Button: Saves interesting posts directly to my Karakeep instance for long-term storage.
There's a lot more extensions which can be browsed in the official repository.
Conclusion
After migrating to this setup, I am reading more in-depth content than what I did before. I've discovered authors sharing valuable perspectives on topics I find interesting that are not within the current hype-cycle. It's also refreshing to follow the creators whose writing feels like the pre-SEO, pre-marketing, pre-AISlop internet.
I still haven't completely stopped randomly browsing YouTube or LinkedIn, but my default way of finding new content is now the feed reader.