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Cross-platform FOSS RSS reader? (lemm.ee)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm looking for an RSS reader that would be able to have its data synchronised across devices using Syncthing (it just should store its data locally in a certain folder that looks the same on all devices).

Any suggestions?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What are you hoping to sync? If it is just your subscription list and every device fetches by itself it shouldn't be too hard. However more complex things like read/unread would be hard to sync using a basic tool like Syncthing. The problem is that tools like Syncthing don't really have any conflict resolution capabilities so apps would need to be written specifically for that form of syncing.

Most open source readers use a shared backend server that manages checking feeds and syncing read events rather than this filesystem level syncing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I do want to have my read statuses synced. I don't plan on reading feeds on all my devices at the same time and thus I believe Syncthing would be sufficient.

The bad thing I see with server-dependent syncing is that you have to either host it yourself (not an option for me at the moment) or trust someone else with your data (not a problem but I prefer to avoid that when possible)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

don’t plan on reading feeds on all my devices at the same time and thus I believe Syncthing would be sufficient.

The problem with this is that you accidentally read on two devices before they sync, Syncthing renamed both files and now you need to manually fix it toget your read status back.

I get that it can work well enough, but I wouldn't want to try and build something based on this.

I get that you want to avoid a server. But I'm not aware of anything in this space. It would be an interesting to create a reader like this that has a custom P2P synchronization protocol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

It would be an interesting to create a reader like this that has a custom P2P synchronization protocol

Yep, using any of the local first software libraries

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I’m curious as well. I use Reeder for MacOS & iOS, which is good but proprietary. I often use AlternativeTo to explore FOSS alternatives: https://alternativeto.net/software/reeder/?license=opensource
Add the OSes you want to use to the filters, which in my case would be “Mac” & “iPhone”:
https://alternativeto.net/software/reeder/?license=opensource&platform=mac%2Ciphone

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Not FOSS, but in my Apple ecosystem, I love News Explorer. Syncs progress between all my devices and fetches the full website in reader mode if wanted.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It seems to be unmaintained now, but DecSync implements that concept: https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Looks like we have a bingo! Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I do not have an answer to your question, but just saying that I was thinking about the same.

We should have some standard format for subscribed feeds (probably just a text file with URLs, newsboat has this) and for related data (read unread state for every article, maybe tags, started articles etc.), I believe this can be done in a text file (one or multiple) too, but AFAIK we don't have this at the moment. If we had this, and RSS apps would support this format of keeping data, we would be able to use RSS on multiple devices seamlessly via just Syncthing, without using any server based solutions like tt-rss, freshrss, inoreader etc.

I'm not a developer myself, so the only thing I can do is hope some day devs of RSS apps implement this.

I wish all apps would keep their data in plain format in accessible locations, so that we wouldn't need any «clouds» for stuff like bookmarks, to-do lists, notes, news etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

As another commenter has said, Syncthing can't do conflict control, so this solution would not be suitable for every user and a lot of them would still prefer something with a server to sync. Still, I'm ready to accept that since I mostly read RSS feeds on a single device and only use the others from time to time

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Same. Also, if all data is stored in plain text, you could be using git or anything else instead of syncthing, so it still would be good to have this as an option.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I don't think there's any.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I'm using a web-based reader for that, it does the syncing for me. For example https://freshrss.org/ or https://www.commafeed.com/