r/rss

A few months ago I started building my own Android RSS reader.

At first, I thought the hardest part would be the UI. A clean reading experience, source management, search... the usual things.

I was wrong.

The biggest challenge turned out to be the feeds themselves.

RSS and Atom are standards, but in the real world every publisher seems to have its own interpretation.

Some feeds use unusual date formats.

Some have missing or inconsistent metadata.

Some provide only partial content.

Some have character encoding issues.

Others contain relative image URLs, duplicate GUIDs, or simply stop working without warning.

On paper everything is "RSS".

In practice, every feed teaches you something new.

Another surprise was that building the app itself was often easier than making it reliable.

Making it work across different Android versions, screen sizes, tablets, landscape mode, and the endless number of edge cases ended up taking far more time than implementing new features.

One thing I learned from this project is that most people aren't really looking for an RSS reader.

They're looking for a way to decide for themselves what they read, without algorithms deciding for them.

That's probably the main reason I kept working on it.

Sometimes implementing a new feature took a few hours.

Finding the cause of a strange compatibility issue could take two days.

Users never notice those fixes.

And maybe that's exactly how good software should feel.

I'm still learning with every release, and I'm sure there are many more surprises ahead.

For those of you who have built RSS-related software (or worked with old internet standards in general):

What was the most unexpected problem you ran into?

Hi o/

I've deployed FreshRSS on an Oracle VM (free-tier) using k3s
It was running perfectly but the feeds are not being fetched

Error Message:

"Blast! This feed has encountered a problem. If this situation persists, please verify that it is still reachable."

I have fair knowledge in containers and k3s but not that good enough to narrow down this particular issue. I really don't know what to do about this.

I tried AI-assisted debugging, and obviously it hallucinates like a lunatic.

I would appreciate any help I can get here, thanks :)

I've had Inoreader for quite a while. Admittedly at the free tier. I had set up several folders to keep tabs on yt vid subscriptions but now, as i tried to add a new one, it will not give me any option to add or even try to find it. Any suggestions or alternatives? Chromebook and android.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been building an app called Petal Feed. On the surface it’s an RSS reader, but over time it grew into something more. Today it brings together RSS, Reddit, Bluesky, and Mastodon in one native app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac because that’s how I naturally consume information. To me, they’re all simply different ways people publish things worth reading.

The reason I started building it is a little different than most. I’m blind, I have cerebral palsy, and I rely on VoiceOver every day. I was constantly moving between apps that all worked differently, had different navigation models, and often treated accessibility as an afterthought. Every unnecessary gesture, every unlabeled control, and every awkward workflow added friction to something I do for hours every day.

Eventually I stopped looking for the perfect reader and decided to build it myself.

What surprised me during the process was that designing around accessibility didn’t make Petal Feed into an app only for people with disabilities. It pushed me to make every interaction simpler, faster, and more intentional. The result is an app that I believe is just a better reading experience for everyone, whether you use VoiceOver or never turn on an accessibility feature in your life.

Petal Feed lets you keep RSS feeds, Reddit, Bluesky, and Mastodon together in one place instead of scattering your reading across multiple apps. It automatically detects duplicate stories that appear in several RSS feeds, includes AI powered summaries when you want to get through a lot of content quickly, and is designed to stay out of your way so you can spend your time reading instead of navigating.

I’m not posting this because I think I’ve built the perfect reader. There are already a lot of excellent RSS apps out there, and I’ve learned something from many of them. I’m posting because I genuinely want feedback from people who read a lot. If you use RSS every day, what frustrates you about your current reader? What feature have you always wished someone would build?

If you’re interested in trying Petal Feed, I’d love to hear what you think, whether that’s praise, criticism, or ideas for making it better. Some of the best features in the app today came directly from conversations with users, and I’m always looking for the next great idea.

Hello everyone,
Ive been working on this for over a year now, and I’m proud of where I got to. That being said I would LOVE criticism/feedback/advice. I truly believe in this, but still haven’t done any official launch as im still refining.
I have a couple of questions: What’s your first impression? Is anything confusing?
Would this be something you’d use regularly? Why ir why not?

I very much appreciate everyone’s time and wish you success in your ventures.

I work in comms, and this is a solo project I've been building in evenings and weekends - mostly out of frustration. I got tired of either paying enterprise money for media monitoring or wrestling with generic apps that clearly weren't built for how we actually read. The whole aim is to cut through the noise and surface what actually matters. It's called Inkline, iOS only.

For the old-school folk here: under the hood it's mostly good old RSS (with a few legal tricks for the sites that don't play nice...).

Just pushed what I'm calling the Editorial Update: a hand-verified directory of 800+ publications across 50+ countries, unified search, and an "Also covered by" feature that shows which other outlets picked up a story - handy for spotting how a narrative is spreading. There are daily briefs too if you want the morning-scan version.

Let me know what you think! If you monitor for a living, what's missing? What would make this replace whatever you're using today?

What's going on with these casino ads? I've been reporting these as spam but is there a better category?

Edit: I'm talking about posts being made to this sub with the title "best online casino in..."; like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/rss/s/4np8zVBXZc

I’m interested to hear ways that others are using RSS that they find most useful and least common.

I’d like some inspiration for using RSS more creatively and want to hear what your favorite cool use cases are.

Sure, we all probably know how to subscribe to a feed, maybe follow something on YouTube or Reddit, maybe follow a newsletter. What are the cool, non-standard things you do?

Like others, I use feedly and Inoreader whenever I need to find something RSS related.

So, I was interested to see if there were any other RSS readers that have a lot of features tied to it that I wasnt aware of? Or who has the most currently?

Last thing...please do not spam your RSS reader if it is new and/or has no current features. Every other thread here includes those posts.

I want to stay upto date in my industries and buisness in general , im from india , we are a chemical / pharmasutical company so how should i stay upto date i cant figure that out , i also subscribed to inoreader pro and asked chat gpt to give me some blog/page/wesite that updated me on that but almost half of them are either dead /not updated or dosent exist in inoreader .

should i subscribe to other plateform or should i stick to inoreader or should i do anything other , i want to be upto date on news in my industries/Import export/ stock market/world/politics ect plese help

Hello,

I’m looking for a way to curate RSS feeds and send them to a e-reader. I’m thinking of something a bit like this: (1) ingest the feeds on a self-hosted server with custom rules, and (2) pass them to the client as a new rss feed (the client being an old Pocketbook Touch HD3 e-reader, i.e. a potato that expects RSS/Atom feeds and nothing else).

I tried FreshRSS and Miniflux, and while they are cool projects, I did not find a way to expose simple RSS feeds. Their API is more complex, mainly compatible with Google Reader. It could be me, because I’m really a noob on all this and my reading of the doc certainly was not super thorough.
But I did not find the answer there and when I look for "RSS filter" on search engines I just stumble on AI-powered stuff. Is there such a thing as a simple RSS proxy app or is everything a database now?

A workaround could be to send the Miniflux feeds to Wallabag (Koreader on the pocketbook can connect to that) but I would much rather keep the RSS feeds separated from the manually fetched pages in Wallabag. Another way would be the Calibre "Fetch News" Feature that publishes epubs periodically based on RSS feeds, but it’s not continuous, and it has the same issue merging and adding noise to another library (my e-books).

I am planning to start a movie review website which can rank better and just saw substack as suggestion. I don't know how to use it and what is RSS feed in it? Can anybody explain me and if you have better options for website builder, drop me suggestions but trying only free options as newbie.

I'm building a small tool for myself that sends a weekly email digest of what my competitors are up to (new content, pricing changes, announcements). I want RSS to be the backbone of the collection layer because it's free and stable, and I'm trying to figure out how far that actually gets me before I have to fall back on scraping.

I'm new to this, so bear with me. Blogs and news sites that expose a feed are the easy part. What I can't tell yet is how much of the rest I can force into RSS:

Sites with no native feed (a pricing page, a changelog): can I generate a feed from them reliably, or is that always going to be brittle?

Social accounts (a competitor's LinkedIn, Instagram) and YouTube channels: is there a sane RSS path here, or is this where feeds just don't work anymore?

I keep seeing RSSHub mentioned as the answer to "make a feed out of anything". For those who actually run it: is it dependable enough to build on, or does it break often enough that you regret it?

Basically I'm trying to draw the line: what stays RSS, and what am I kidding myself about. If you've built anything that aggregates a lot of different source types, I'd love to know where the feed approach held up and where it fell apart.

I have been using Inoreader for years now, but I see that RSS Reader applications have evolved a lot, I have tried several, but the ones I liked the most with a plane lifetime have been AGR Reader and SmartRSS.

I asked Gemini and ChatGPT to see if they decided, but they are so evenly matched that I still doubt which one to choose.

Let's see if you can help me, thank you 😉