Many years ago I was a happy Google Reader user. For many years of my golden teenager age I used it to consume all the new content related to startups, tech, fashion and travel. It was amazing because I could classify the content by categories, tracking each website I wanted to read, and always been up to date.
When they decided to shout down on July 2013 I tried to use Feedly for a few weeks but it was not the same.
Since then I stop tracking the content from my favorite websites and sadly I stopped consuming it often.
The thing is I never feel I missed because I got busy with other stuff, and the raise of social media in the upcoming years was part of the reason. I am sure about of it without thinking. Social media had a huge impact in how we consume content, even from websites.
The good thing is that recently I started to read blogs again, so I think it was a good time to find a RSS Reader. For my surprise there were no free alternatives and not even paid good alternatives. Until I discover a self-hosted solution call Fresh RSS.
I did a little research, maybe I invested like 1 hour doing it. But based on everything I see is the solution that makes the most sense for my specific use case:
- Have different categories
- Mark all as a read by category or site
- Easy to bookmark things
- Cheap or free
Fresh RSS is the perfect solution for me! I hosted on a cheap VM running on Google Cloud, using Docker, and it took me like 15 minutes to be up and running.
Here’s a list of other alternatives I found useful from Luke Singham: The Best Self-Hosted RSS Feed Readers.
