Two weeks ago I stopped using TinyTinyRSS as my RSS feed reader. I love having self-hosted apps and the privacy and control they provide, but honestly I wasn’t real worried about someone snooping my RSS feeds or contaminating my OPML.
I’ve been making a move back to some cloud-based apps recently to avoid the maintenance and backup space that my self-hosted apps require. I decided to try two popular feed readers and see how they compared. I left myself a reminder in Google Keep (see? NOT everything is self-hosted) to give it two weeks to decide which feed reader I was going to stick with. I disabled my TTRSS instance and opened two new tabs with Feedly and Inoreader
The first thing I noticed was how similar they both looked to my default layout in TTRSS. This was going to be easy – they look almost the same! I imported my OPML file and away I went.
While both apps performed admirably, I was struck by how much MORE they both wanted to do for me.
Feedly wanted to help me find new feeds in which I might be interested. It offered a secure area for my Private Business Content. It allowed me to perform power searches for keywords and let me mark articles to be read later. The free account limited me to 100 feeds, but I’ve only got about 75, so I was OK.
Inoreader let me most of the same things and offered unlimited feeds. I could also automatically tag and organize items as they came in. Inoreader also keeps my old articles (Feedly stops indexing articles older than 30 days).
Both of these apps offer a paid version with even more features. Features I didn’t investigate because I wasn’t interested in paying for something that was working just fine on my self-hosted app.
So today my reminder popped up. I was to decide which app I was going to stick with.
What did I decide?
I decided to re-enable my self-hosted TTRSS instance and go back to something that was never broken in the first place.
While TTRSS may not offer all the bells and whistles of the competition (maybe? TTRSS does have a fair amount of plug-ins), it does exactly what I want for the price I want to pay. It’s performed admirably for three years or more and I can’t think of a better reason to change. I’ve checked out some options and I recommend highly each of the above to anyone who doesn’t have the desire or server space to self-host.
But for me, it’s back to TTRSS. Another open-source success story.