NextCloud + NewsFlash

I was a big fan of RSS feeds back in the day and was really bummed out when Google Reader was retired. I tried out various alternatives but they all had issues–at least at the time. Some were too pricey, some had tracking or privacy issues that I didn't like, and some were clunky from a usability perspective. Eventually I gave up and rather lazily moved to social media to consume online information.

As I look at it now It's interesting to me that Reader was shut down in 2013, just a few years after Wikipedia says that Twitter and Facebook really went mainstream (around 2010). I wonder if I'd have avoided some of the social media drama if Reader would have stuck around, or if I'd tried harder to find an RSS replacement.

In any case, finding a good replacement for Google Reader has surfaced for me again as I've run into the limits of my current bookmark-based browsing habits and as the fact that we've mulled over digital spaces in general recently. One of the first things I checked out was goread, an excellent command line based RSS reader. It's polished, fast, and extremely fun to use.

I've used goread for several months now and have thoroughly enjoyed it. I realized fairly quickly though that it wasn't going to be a permanent browsing replacement for me. First, I quickly discovered that I do most of my casual browsing on my phone. The second reason is that there's not a good way to jump easily from the text article to the actual article, and you don't see the whole article in the terminal, just a default top section. In spite of these reservations I still really like the program. If I mostly browsed articles on my laptop I think I would have found my solution.

After ruling out goread I considered self-hosting an RSS feed reader. There are a lot of good options out there. The ones I decided to investigate were Tiny Tiny RSS, Miniflux and NewsBlur. Miniflux in particular was one that I actually started to configure at one point. Eventually though I gave up on that as well. I already self host Nextcloud as well as this blog on two Raspberry Pis. Although I think the faster of the two could handle hosting a reader on top of a ghost blog, I became hesitant once I realized that running multiple services would involve: multiple databases, multiple web servers (Apache plus Nginx), and opening multiple ports or installing docker and launching that along with the other systems. I wasn't certain how the Pi would handle all of those moving pieces, and wasn't looking forward to trying to secure them all.

Finally though I think I settled on an ideal solution. It turns out that Nextcloud already has an RSS aggregator called Nextcloud News. I'd avoided this in the past for a couple of reasons. First, when I initially tried to install it, I found that it needed a 64 bit operating system, and the board I was running Nextcloud on at the time was 32 bit. Later, when I'd upgraded servers, I found the interface less than ideal, and didn't necessarily want to 2FA into Nextcloud every time I wanted read articles. On top of that, Nextcloud on a Pi isn't the fastest system once you start navigating through apps (mostly I use it just to sync files). What made it all come together was reading about NewsFlash on OMG Ubuntu. NewsFlash is a very polished RSS reader that you can run on Linux. As I was drooling over screenshots I figured it wasn't for me since it only seemed to integrate with paid services like Feedly and Fever. But I decided to look into it and found that they recently added support for Nextcloud. It was very much news to me that aggregated RSS feeds in Nextcloud could be exposed to other services like NewsFlash.

This strikes me as the perfect setup. I have an RSS aggregator that's already secure, well-established, and hosted as a Nextcloud app, and an RSS Reader that's polished and fast. Both updates made in NewsFlash as well as the Nextcloud RSS reader on my phone will be synced to the same place. I'm not 100% sure what memory usage looks like over time but, worst case, if I need to upgrade disk or memory for Nextcloud because of this I'm getting the benefit both for file syncing as well as RSS feeds.

I know this seems like a niche or minor thing, but I'm really excited about this find. I've spent a lot of time putting this off, thinking about it, and poking through bookmarks the slow way. To find a solution that was mostly already in place was a very welcome discovery. I was already extremely impressed with Nextcloud as a platform. Plus, the more I learn about the downsides of supposedly "free" services (such as their tendency to suddenly disappear, or having huge privacy concerns) the more I appreciate products like this.