Where do you get your news from? Who are you trusting to curate how you remain up to date with what’s going on in the world? That deserves more scrutiny and intentionality in an age plagued with fake news and media manipulation.
Cloud
Inoreader
InoReader is not open-source.
No, not Feedly. Feedly is great, but their privacy policy isn’t. Instead, we’re going to start with Inoreader. Their stance on privacy is more favorable, though their code isn’t open-source. Then again, neither does their other offering Raindrop.io. Their plans offer a dizzying number of features at compelling price points. Even an ad-supported free tier. The interface is pretty attractive, and you can customize it further to your liking.
Ground News
Ground News is not open-source.
Ground News is the gold standard in this category. Not for any technical feature, but for their philosophy. Ground News exposes political bias in outlets and individual stories. They provide the unique opportunity to explore the same story from different perspectives. This helps you cut through the bias and get closer to the truth.
More importantly, they bring to the forefront one’s own political leaning and biases. The hope is that this makes one consciously seek to correct them. This is sorely lacking in today’s hypertoxic political climate. Thankfully, they can help there too. The “Blindspot” section contains stories that aren’t covered one’s side of the spectrum.
It starts at $10/year for their most basic plan which includes most of their features. For $30/year you remove the blind spot limit and gain access to their fact-checking score. The most expensive $100/year tier unlocks deeper understanding of your own bias. Additionally, it reveals the ownership behind different publishers.
InShorts
InShorts is not open-source.
While their privacy policy doesn’t inspire confidence, the concept is pretty interesting. They summarize news articles down to 60 words, presumably without losing any meat.
As much as this offends me as a writer, it is 20202024. People nowadays often don’t have the time or attention span to read an entire article. This is of course exacerbated by clickbait and bloat practices on the part of publishers. Such deceptive practices make readers feel cheated out of their time and attention.
Regardless. As a reader myself, this definitely scratches a longstanding itch for me. When I see a headline about, say, “X new device feature has been leaked!”, I’m not trying to read a thousand words. I want to see the feature and get on with my day. Nowadays, many skip the first few paragraphs because they’re expected to be SEO bloat. Often the info we’re interested in could easily be included in the title or the meta description.
That’s what’s great about InShorts. It feels like you’re reading a description, but it’s actually the entire gist of the article.
With all that said, I can’t really recommend InShorts. Not only for the privacy qualms, and the fact that they run ads. The writing quality of the summaries is also very poor. On the technical side, it’s infested with bugs. Your set preferences don’t even apply. This means you’re often inundated with news you don’t care about or want to see. That defeats the entire point of saving your time.
I would love to see a better, more privacy-friendly alternative to InShorts take off.
Self-hosted
Cypht
I’ve covered Cypht as an email client. It also supports searchable and readable RSS feeds. Cypht sanitizes feeds in the same way it does mail, by removing all external resources in the process. So while it may not be the most authentic or fun reading experience, it’s likely the safest.
Omnivore
Omnivore is arguably the best self-hostable RSS reader. It goes beyond managing your bookmarks and being a news reader. It also adds collaboration through notes and highlighting. It supports email newsletters and advanced organizing features. It plugs into popular knowledge aggregators like Obsidian and Logseq. It remembers your reading position in long articles. Text-to-speech (for iOS). Native mobile apps, on top of the PWA, on top of the web app, and on top of the browser extensions for every browser out there.
The catch? Self-hosting. While technically possible, it’s rather complicated right now. That’s because Omnivore uses Google’s Cloud Platform and depends on its services. It’s still not possible to self-host without the self-hoster using those services. The good news is that they’re working on it. The bad news is that they don’t even support E2EE on their own servers. While not necessarily a dealbreaker, I would advise you not to put anything personal on there for now.
TinyTinyRSS
FreshRSS
Miniflux
yarrr
Self-hosters have quite a few options available here. TTRSS, FRSS, Miniflux, and yarr are all very similar. They’re all free, open-source, light-weight, and run on your own server.
They are all rather uninspiring to look at compared to more mainstream options. Miniflux and yarr are the most modern-looking one of the bunch. But if you’re not big on looks anyway or enjoy the Hacker News aesthetic, these should be fine. Of course, being open-source also means you’re free to make any changes your heart desires.
Clients
Fluent Reader
Fluent Reader is a beautiful, cross-platform, open-source RSS leader. Like Feeder, it gives you the option to read locally. But if you do happen to have your own self-hosted RSS service, you can sync to it as well. It’s a real proud-pleaser with the amount of features it supports. It includes keyboard shortcuts and advanced organization using folders, hidden articles, stars. Even regex search filters!
Nextcloud News
If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you’re not surprised to see this here. Of course, Nextcloud has its own official news client. It looks farily modern and in line with Nextcloud’s overall design language. Learn more about Nextcloud in our Google Drive alternatives article or our G-suite alternatives article.
Handy News Reader
Handy News Reader is [Flym]‘s life extension. It adds a lot of cool features like “remove when finished reading”, gestures, and push notifications. It’s also offline-first and allows for a great degree of customizability.
Flym
~~Flym is a minimalist feed reader built using simplistic Material Design philosophies. ~~
Update 2021:
It’s been abandoned. Handy News Reader is a rebranded fork that is still maintained.
Feeder
Feeder stands out with a unique serverless local-only approach. There’s no need to sign up for an account or log into one. This is great for privacy because it means they don’t have any of your personal data to protect. It’s offline-first and uses a Material Design interface reminiscent of Google’s Now feed.
FeedMe
FeedMe is another sleeper. Its sleek, minimalist and customizable UI packs some real brunt under the hood. It supports several different views (including summaries), offline reading, podcasts and even text-to-speech. You can navigate using gestures or the volume buttons. It also supports basic organization via tagging and staring.
Read You
If Material You is more your cup of tea, you’ll enjoy Read You. It’s a relative newcomer on the scene so it still lacks a few features and support for some RSS services.
Twine Reader
While Read You embraces Material You’s minimalist side, Twine splashes it with a dash of aero glass and blur. It’s very reminiscent of Fluent Design, actually. Ironically, it makes Fluent Reader‘s design look rather basic in comparison.
Anyway looks aside, it supports importing, exporting, and pinning of feeds. Bookmarks, sync, and a gorgeous distraction-free reading mode. So it’s definitely not just a pretty face.