First of all, many of us used Google Reader and Google shutting that down totally destroyed my trust in Google and other companies. My reader is critical infrastructure for me and I do not want some random company to screw me again. I think that many others experienced losing a valuable tool and that is why there are so many selfhosted RSS readers out there.

For me, it is because I don’t want to leave my power hungry desktop running 24/7 to just capture feeds… I already self host, so I let that do the fetching on a schedule, then my rss client just fetches from my server

IMO, I think my answer here is really the same for all of my self-hosted apps: I want to control the flow of the data myself and not be upset when an app we use every day is retired or changed or just enshittifies over time. And this way, I know nobody is in between me and the news publisher. They can see what I read but nobody else is watching over that process in the middle.

I was a loyal Inoreader fan for many years before switching to FreshRSS on my server and I won’t go back. That’s a great service but self hosting any app is just better.

There are several reasons.

1. As others have commented - centralization. I have ONE place that I go to catch up on the internet. I don’t have to remember to check the 30+ ish blogs that I’m following.
2. It avoids any algorithms, so I only see what I have chosen to see.
3. Did you know that each and every YouTube channel has its own RSS feed? It’s far more reliable than YouTube’s own notifications.
4. It’s a far more pleasant reading experience than most websites.

I self-host RSSHub so my reader can pull feeds for websites that don’t provide them. I don’t host my reader, though.

Most company-owned services are 1) Tracking your behavior 2) Going to upsell you (freemium, etc.) You think Feedly is ‘free’ - not really, they are collecting your info and have a team of marketers trying to figure out how to get $$ out of you, and will slowly gate features behind the paywall.

MinifluxRSS with Nextflux frontend (browser) and Caddy for Android. You can now write .py/etc. scripts to capture your starred items to Obsidian (or favorite PKB), run AI on those to summarize, tag, and organize. I find it easier and it will never ‘shut down’ or change model.

I usually read my RSS feeds on my phone. That’s fine - I could do this by just subscribing to the sources directly. But every once in a while I want to look up something I read some years ago and I don’t quite remember what the article was called and where it was published. Filtering and searching on my desktop is much more convenient and I have my history saved there - even if the blog in question is offline in the meantime. In addition some RSS feeds only send a short text and a “read more” link. With FreshRSS I can configure a feed to automatically load the complete article from the website and in my reader it shows up as if the feed was a real full feed with pictures and everything. I can even compress the pictures to optimize loading as my main reader is my phone.

one Location for dozen of rss feeds instead of looking up each individual. alternative is of course setting up the feeds on the client computer, but that works only nice if you use it only from one device (e.g. read history sync).

furthermore i prefer to have such set ups on a server with backups, so if e.g. my phone gets lost i don’t need to find back all those urls.

Because there’s no native sync for feeds between NetNewsWire and FreshRSS. iOS and Windows developers don’t develop useful apps for both platforms for free.

I have more control over it and I don’t need to create accounts and give out my email address.

Pretty much what others said, I host Fresh RSS.

For me the main point is, syncronization. Point is I want to read on my phone, or if i go to another computer catch up on it. If I set up a seperate RSS reader on each, then I’d have to figure out what’s read and what’s not. Honestly that’s a feature that google reader really had me spoiled in, I loved being able to use a work computer, browse through my rss feeds, star articles that I thought I may want to come back to, go home look at the starred ones and then go back.

Then google reader shut down, and I wanted to be able to do the same again, while also not being vulnerable to another shut down.

I host Tiny Tiny RSS.

• my list of subscriptions and categorisations are centralised so I don’t have to set this up on any other device. I can access this on my phone, tablet and PC.
• it synchronises read/unread stories across devices so I don’t have to keep sifting through the same articles I’ve seen.
• I’ve got a long list of blacklisted words. I don’t want to hear about sports news, celebrity gossip, USA-centric news, “he said/she said” bullshit from social media that mainstream news seems to love to report, etc. Now I can set up my blacklist in one place centrally.
• there are a lot of great apps that will access the server RSS feed. I’m never actually going to to TTRSS browser page.

The point isn’t to download content to the server at all. It’s to keep the centralised list. I host opodsync (Gpodder podcast server) for the same reason.

Because you don’t want your phone connecting to 200 servers every hour. And to sync across devices.

Oh I can actually answer something, neat.

I thought I was missing the appeal too, but when I got back into tabletop roleplaying games, a lot of the community is located over on Substack blogs, and I don’t like Substack. My solution was to start running FreshRSS and put all of the feeds into it so I could read at my own pace, and also not have to go to a million sites to keep track of content. Saves me a lot of tabs in an internet browser, if nothing else.

Sadly, not all sites or blogs have RSS feeds to hand out, but I’ve used https://openrss.org/ to get around that for the most part if they don’t.