In the last year or so, I've been getting back into RSS. I was a big user back in the Google Reader days, but after that, I moved to Twitter, and then nothing at all for a while. It's good to be reading thoughtful content sans algorithms again.

For months now, I've been using NetNewsWire, which is a solid client on both MacOS and iOS. It's a great experience; other feed clients are perhaps prettier, but NNW gets out of the way and lets me focus on the content.

NNW makes it easy to use iCloud to sync feeds between devices, but now that I'm following around 350 feeds, it's pretty slow to update. It also can sync with several services, and so I recently decided to try the one self-hosted option that NNW support: FreshRSS.

This was a great chance to try PikaPods, a hosting service that supports a (relatively) small number of managed apps at a very small price. It took just minutes to set up my own FreshRSS pod, at a price of less than $2 a month¹. Once the pod was up and running, it was trivial to export an OPML file out of NNW and into FreshRSS, and then connect my FreshRSS account to NNW. It's only been a few days now, but syncing is clearly so much faster.

I haven't spent too much time in the FreshRSS UI yet. You could read from there, if you wanted to, but I'm still happy with NNW. It definitely excels at feed management, though. After importing all 300+ feeds, I could easily filter to see only dead links, and unsubscribe from those feeds. There's also a good view of idle feeds: feeds that are still available, but haven't had new items added for several years.

I ran into one bug after importing my OPML file: FreshRSS was trying to parse JSON feeds as XML feeds, and was of course erroring. I had to go through these one by one and mark them as JSON feeds in the configuration for each feed. I'm not sure if this is a bug in the OPML import functionality specifically or part of adding a feed in general, but it's a little annoying. When adding new feeds, I've been choosing XML, just in case.

There are still a bunch of FreshRSS features I haven't tried². But so far, it's been a welcome addition to my daily workflows.