Owning My Reading List

For years I have been reading news and blogs via RSS. At first via Bloglines and later Google Reader. When that was no longer possible, I searched for alternatives for a while. After some time with hosted FeedWrangler and self-hosted TinyTinyRSS, I eventually settled with Feedly. Until recently. The fact that a lot of my personal, private interests are processed by a company made me look out for privacy friendly options.

I usually read content on my iPhone or iPad, but sometimes also on an Mac. For phone and tablet I have been using multiple succeeding versions of the paid for Reeder app. I didn’t want to buy their Mac app, so Feedly conveniently allowed me to use their browser based app.

The latest version of Reeder supports local, device only, accounts, but also added synced iCloud Feed accounts. This provides reading across multiple devices. But not for Mac, in my case. Reading and feed management became impossible on Mac, as well as on my Windows work PC.

Conveniently, NetNewsWire is a free and open source alternative for Reeder, that also supports Mac. It allows for an iCloud account to be used across all devices. Most issues were solved. Except that my feed list is not accessible on a PC or any other non-Apple device.

To jump that last hurdle, I am currently using a self-hosted FreshRSS installation with my hosting provider. It is easily installed through Softaculous, but required changing some ModSecurity settings.

At the moment, I am using the very good Reeder app on iPhone and iPad, and NetNewsWire on a Mac. And I can fall back to any browser on any computer if I need to.

I now finally own my reading list.