I was a NNW user for years and it's why I eventually built my own news reader. NNW had a lot of great features and I wanted to mostly keep them. You might find that NewsBlur takes a similar path but with a different set of opinions.
Personally I keep it syncing off TTRSS for filtering and automatic actioning on certain feed entries, but that aint everyone's cup of tea. I'd like to think NNW at least covers most people's use cases whether standalone or relying off another service to aggregate.
RSS’ death is real - 15 years ago, almost every news site had a RSS feed, some had several ones. Today? RSS feed is rare.
So if you want to make news feed from news sites, you have to use parsing their html code, and ofc everybody has its own structure. JS powered sites are painful ones.
Mistral used to serve a feed actually up until 6ish months ago I guess? Their admin console used to be built with HTMX too which I found kinda interesting.
Now the news site and admin console is all in Next.js and slow and no feed.
It is somehow less funny today but in the 90's we would say "is there something wrong with your hands?"
A truly funny story: I wrote an rss aggregator and one day I discover some feeds had died without me noticing it. I looked at the feed, it was gone, I look at my aggregate and the headlines were all there?!?!
Since I gather a lot of feeds I couldn't help but noticed that a very large amount isn't wellformed. For example, in xml attributes the & (in urls) is suppose to be &, if you do that however many aggregators won't be able to parse it.
Every other month I wrote little bits of code to address the most annoying issues.
1) if I cant find a <link> or <guide> etc I eventually just gather <a>'s and take the href.
2) if I really cant find a title for the item I had it fail back on whatever is in the <a> since I was gathering those anyway.
3) if I cant even find an <item> I just look for the things that are suppose to go in the <item>
4) if I cant find a proper time stamp ill try parse one out of the url
5) if the urls are relative path complete them.
What was actually going on: The feed was gone, it redirected to the home page. In an attempt to parse the "xml" it eventually resorted to gathering the url and title from the <a>'s and build valid time stamps from the urls.
15 years ago, almost every news site had a RSS feed, some had several ones. Today? RSS feed is rare.
It may be a reflection of where you get your news.
New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Radio Free Europe, Mainichi, and lots of other legitimate primary source Big-J journalism news sites have RSS.
Rando McRepost's AI-Generated Rehash Blog? Not so much.
Seriously. I've been updating NewsBlur with all the pet features people have wanted for years and I'm finding that it's even more enjoyable now with all those AI features built in. Daily briefing, ask AI, story clustering, all of these are AI-flavored improvements to RSS and it's so relaxing to open up my river of news and scroll through all the good stuff without feeling a gross algorithm surfacing endless outrage.
I read plenty of X as well as scroll through various social media apps and nothing comes close to how great RSS feels to read.
Nice! I'm also around 2000 feeds in my reader, carefully selected over a couple of years. Only difference: I always click through to the website to read an article.
Now in the process of slowly making RSS my only social feed. Have a hard time of leaving Youtube, but once I embedded the videos of the channels I follow in my RSS reader I see a way of not getting annoyed by the recommendation algorithm on their website anymore.
Personally, I'm not a fan of the feed-per-column style as I like to subscribe to personal blogs which post a handful of times per year. Maybe 100 feeds which average 2-5 posts per year. Is there a way to merge columns? But may not be the intended audience.
I do feel like RSS feeds are one of the easier things to do DIY, custom to people's specific taste of how to list data of this sort. All the 'off the shelf' RSS feeds that I see feel contrived, cluttered and bloated.
I think the space of RSS feed readers and aggregators are very rich already. The pain point for ordinary users is to have easy way to generate RSS feeds for websites that don't provide organic one.
There are few options but mostly proprietary and expensive. And no normal person will want to play the CSS tricks to extract feed that something like FreshRSS support.
Current setup is freshrss running in a proxmox lxc on prem + tailscale. Big fan of the lire iOS app for interacting on mobile and use the freshrss webui on desktop. killthenewsletter helps patch in some email stuff too. RSS and NNTP are 2 technologies that have been with me for decades and you are gonna have to pry them from me.
Also built my own rss reader https://gmnz.xyz/projects/ember-feed/ with an emphasis on code block themes because I mostly follow engineering and developer blogs.
I saw Current Reader (no affiliation) posted on the web a couple days ago. It seems like a nice way to keep up to date with many hundreds of feeds by giving them different priorities, where for example a low priority feed may disappear from view quicker than a higher priority one. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/current-reader/id6758530974
I used to use Reeder pretty religiously but as websites started to lock down their feeds and charge subscriptions, it became less useful over time. As readership declines, publishers are rightly concerned to protect their remaining revenue by charging subscriptions. I would love for a new protocol to exist which could compensate providers appropriately and allow for consumer choice in reading with whatever app
After many tests I'm on YARR, not super-happy but for my volumes of feeds and time it's the best fit still actively developed, before I was on TT-Rss. I've tried elfeed and RSS2email with notmuch/emacs but while wonderful they demand too much time because they are meant to READ posts, while, well having many I more scroll and pick then going through all. Gnus with scoring maybe better but create the scoring for today news it's challenging...
The other issue is that bot detection has gotten pretty good. So fishing out the full content rather than a single sentence summary is getting ever harder.
Been toying with that and concluded you basically have to use a service. From a random VPS between 60-90% gets blocked
I have been using it for a few weeks, was never really into RSS (I quite like to be oriented to the web site I’m reading), but have found newsagent nice to use
cadamsdotcom | a day ago
I (re)discovered RSS a few months ago via NetNewsWire, and it’s so calming and empowering to curate one’s own feed.
Rumors of RSS’ death are greatly exaggerated.
simonw | a day ago
conesus | 21 hours ago
reddalo | 13 hours ago
mashpanic | 4 hours ago
reddalo | 3 hours ago
miladyincontrol | a day ago
Personally I keep it syncing off TTRSS for filtering and automatic actioning on certain feed entries, but that aint everyone's cup of tea. I'd like to think NNW at least covers most people's use cases whether standalone or relying off another service to aggregate.
nntwozz | 23 hours ago
https://newsfirex.com
Just look at it, NNW is still using the same great design.
sixtyj | 23 hours ago
So if you want to make news feed from news sites, you have to use parsing their html code, and ofc everybody has its own structure. JS powered sites are painful ones.
6510 | 21 hours ago
edit: provide an example please
quectophoton | 20 hours ago
https://mistral.ai/news/
olowe | 12 hours ago
Now the news site and admin console is all in Next.js and slow and no feed.
6510 | 8 hours ago
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0xSMW/rss-feeds/main/feeds...
from here
https://github.com/0xSMW/rss-feeds
crabmusket | 19 hours ago
https://help.abc.net.au/hc/en-us/articles/6147104938383-Why-...
aragilar | 14 hours ago
6510 | 7 hours ago
A truly funny story: I wrote an rss aggregator and one day I discover some feeds had died without me noticing it. I looked at the feed, it was gone, I look at my aggregate and the headlines were all there?!?!
Since I gather a lot of feeds I couldn't help but noticed that a very large amount isn't wellformed. For example, in xml attributes the & (in urls) is suppose to be &, if you do that however many aggregators won't be able to parse it.
Every other month I wrote little bits of code to address the most annoying issues. 1) if I cant find a <link> or <guide> etc I eventually just gather <a>'s and take the href. 2) if I really cant find a title for the item I had it fail back on whatever is in the <a> since I was gathering those anyway. 3) if I cant even find an <item> I just look for the things that are suppose to go in the <item> 4) if I cant find a proper time stamp ill try parse one out of the url 5) if the urls are relative path complete them.
What was actually going on: The feed was gone, it redirected to the home page. In an attempt to parse the "xml" it eventually resorted to gathering the url and title from the <a>'s and build valid time stamps from the urls.
6510 | 8 hours ago
https://www.abc.net.au/news/feed/51120/rss.xml
I haven't fully examined it but looking at the xml I see it was last build in 2026 and a headline about Women's Asian Cup 2026.
abc.net.au/news/2026-03-05/matildas-iran-asian-cup-quick-hits-hayley-raso-mary-fowler/106413886
reaperducer | 19 hours ago
It may be a reflection of where you get your news.
New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Radio Free Europe, Mainichi, and lots of other legitimate primary source Big-J journalism news sites have RSS.
Rando McRepost's AI-Generated Rehash Blog? Not so much.
conesus | 21 hours ago
I read plenty of X as well as scroll through various social media apps and nothing comes close to how great RSS feels to read.
rambambram | a day ago
Now in the process of slowly making RSS my only social feed. Have a hard time of leaving Youtube, but once I embedded the videos of the channels I follow in my RSS reader I see a way of not getting annoyed by the recommendation algorithm on their website anymore.
rambambram | 23 hours ago
CqtGLRGcukpy | 17 hours ago
For example, the RSS feed for the defunctland channel is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCVo63lb....
renegat0x0 | 15 hours ago
However 2 days ago google marked my page as harmful, so probably not that many will be able to access it.
https://rumca-js.github.io/feeds
rambambram | 13 hours ago
nokya | a day ago
squeegmeister | a day ago
krembo | a day ago
It’s still a work in progress, so treat this as an early preview before I submit it to Show HN. Feedback and criticism are welcome.
8organicbits | 9 hours ago
Personally, I'm not a fan of the feed-per-column style as I like to subscribe to personal blogs which post a handful of times per year. Maybe 100 feeds which average 2-5 posts per year. Is there a way to merge columns? But may not be the intended audience.
I suggest OPML import to make it easier for people to move subscriptions. Feed discovery tools also like to integrate with feed readers, can you add an API like https://agglu.com/subscribe?url=https://example.com/feed.xml
jurakovic | a day ago
I have many more ideas, but I don't have that much free time to implement all of it (even with Claude Code). But it serves me very well for now
abetusk | 22 hours ago
I do feel like RSS feeds are one of the easier things to do DIY, custom to people's specific taste of how to list data of this sort. All the 'off the shelf' RSS feeds that I see feel contrived, cluttered and bloated.
elashri | 23 hours ago
There are few options but mostly proprietary and expensive. And no normal person will want to play the CSS tricks to extract feed that something like FreshRSS support.
nickthegreek | 21 hours ago
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS | 18 hours ago
It does everything I need with no fuss.
lawgimenez | 21 hours ago
loughnane | 19 hours ago
outlore | 18 hours ago
I used to use Reeder pretty religiously but as websites started to lock down their feeds and charge subscriptions, it became less useful over time. As readership declines, publishers are rightly concerned to protect their remaining revenue by charging subscriptions. I would love for a new protocol to exist which could compensate providers appropriately and allow for consumer choice in reading with whatever app
ece | 18 hours ago
moralcoral | 15 hours ago
kkfx | 14 hours ago
Havoc | 10 hours ago
Been toying with that and concluded you basically have to use a service. From a random VPS between 60-90% gets blocked
headsman771 | 8 hours ago
https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email
oigursh | 4 hours ago
Non-RSS feeds like bluesky as well
euoia | 4 hours ago
paladum | an hour ago