NetNewsWire + iCloud sync has been great for me. Feedbin is the one I’d use if I needed to use another RSS client.
A couple cool things about Feedbin is that you can share an RSS feed of your liked articles, and they provide an email address you can use for subscribing to newsletters.
Feedly offers that too, but only for Pro+ subscribers (I have Pro):
So I use this free alternative instead for newsletters:
I’m still using Reeder. We may need to go back and look at the available options for show content again. Seems like the RSS space is always in motion.
Thanks everyone for your thoughts (and sorry for my delayed response!) - it’s always interesting to see how different people have approached this problem.
I suppose one saving grace is that I do have a bit of time to solve this, as Feed Wrangler isn’t shutting down until next March. As @MacSparky says, this field is constantly in flux - perhaps by say Autumn there will be additional options in this space? It would certainly be good to revisit this around then, if for no other reason that to remind Feed Wrangler subscribers that they need to find an alternative 
This does seem like the rare decision where procrastination seems like the best plan. As you say, the options are constantly changing. Maybe 10 days before shutdown the search becomes urgent. Until then, keep your eyes and ears open for options and don’t worry about it! 
Bumping this up a little, as I’m puzzled.
Various work and personal commitments meant that I got to the end of February and hadn’t decided on a replacement for the excellent FeedWrangler. Oh ****, I thought, and hurriedly signed up to Feedbin and imported my data for the free trial (giving me another month to figure out a longer term solution).
Yet… 12 days after 1st March, and FeedWrangler lives on. Or at least, it is still syncing with Reeder for me, and I can still log in…
Has @_Davidsmith had a change of heart? Or am I hoping in vain?
If it does continue I’d be very happy to continue paying for it (even with eg a 25-50% price increase to $25-$29/yr). But I’ve not seen anything official to indicate this - or indeed to confirm it has shut down.
Can anyone shed any light on this?
Edit: I should probably add, I saw the other day that David’s WidgetSmith has had 100 million downloads from the App Store. For any developer, let alone an indie one-man band, that is incredible. I can certainly understand why he would want to focus on something of that scale, rather than FeedWrangler!
I never saw that warning. I sync a lot on all devices. Noticed no problems, other than I subscribe to too many feeds and I never get through most of them. Easy to mark everything in all feeds as “read”.
One of the many things I like about Readwise Reader is that I don’t need another service to manage the feeds. I can add the feeds directly to Reader.
Reeder works fine (though more slowly) if you just put all the feeds in your icloud account instead of subscribing to a feed aggregation back end. News Explorer or Net Newswire work just as well but seem to fetch and render the posts much more quickly than Reeder (using iCloud sync - Reeder is just as fast using a back end service).
My experience is that if you move fairly quickly from one device to another using iCloud with any of these apps, you will see posts that you have already marked as read much more often than when you use a feed service to sync. It’s the unpredictability of iCloud. If you drop in to different devices several times a day, and with an hour or so between accesses, iCloud sync works very well. I’m happy to occasionally not have all posts marked as read that should be, provided that I see all the posts in my feed, which those three apps all seem to manage.
It was great while it lasted. I appreciate his hard work. I moved to Feedbin when he announced it last year and love it. Paired with FieryFeeds, its a fantastically powerful RSS experience.
Followed this and started using FreshRSS at least locally. I like it, plain, simple and easy. Any chance you could share your setup?
127.0.0.1/api based on the configuration in the UI. Not sure how to access it from the browser.I do have Reeder as well so will connect it FreshRSS if this works fine. (don’t wanna use iCloud on work machine so syncing becomes an issue)
I am using FreshRSS on my shared hosting account where my websites are located at anyway. I have created a subdomain there and have called it rss.domainname.com. I have connected this subdomain to the FreshRSS folder that I have created on the webspace and where I have uploaded the FreshRSS files to. I have used my hosting provider to create a free LetsEncrypt certificate for rss.domainname.com and I have configured this subdomain in a way that it enforces the use of https (a setting at my hosting provider). I have created a MySQL database at my hosting provider for FreshRSS. The FreshRSS interface is reachable at rss.domainname.com (by design), there was nothing I had to do to make it reachable. When I first launched the web interface, it prompted me to set up a user with a password and asked what database to be used (MySQL, database, server, username, password provided by my hosting provider). My webspace is being backed up daily. I have a cronjob running that does a daily backup of the database which is important because the files on the webserver of course do not contain the actual data. After that everything is being synced to my NAS.
Running FreshRSS on your Mac (localhost) or NAS or wherever else locally for sure is possible, but I think that it may be a little complicated to achieve the same (LetsEncrypt, forwarding a subdomain through your router to your Mac to a certain folder on the Mac’s web server and what not…). It is way more easy to use a hosting solution.
FreshRss hat some info about the installation and other stuff at FreshRSS Administration and for the user stuff at FreshRSS.
Thanks for answering!
Just to understand, is that the only authentication in place? (in addition to the connection being SSL). How secure is it?
Curious as to why you need to back up FreshRSS? I thought once we read the feeds we don’t need them anymore, unless you need the favorites…
After reading your self-hosting approach today, I managed to set up fresh RSS via cloud provider, but it’s not HTTPS so I need to enable that. It would be helpful if you could share how you did that LetsEncrypt. And what you do in the crown job if any (just in case)
PS: I like that rss.domainname.com way. I might take inspiration from that 
It depends on the username and the password, I guess? I am using a username that is not easy to guess and my passwords come from 1Password and have 30 characters or more. What else do you have in mind to authenticate? 2FA? Passkeys? Nothing of those options are available right now. But I do not miss them for a RSS reader service (I have no sensitive data inside of this service).
You asked “Backups”? 
My webserver (shared hosting) is backed up daily including all its databases and files. No matter if FreshRSS or my actual websites. I have no data that is not being backed up? I agree that FreshRSS does not contain any mission critical data. So, if you do not need a backup, you do not need a backup.
This is not a setting in FreshRSS. If you access FreshRSS with https:// instead of http:// your are using HTTPS. If you don’t, you don’t. The webserver can be configured to only deliver via HTTPS even if the request comes as HTTP. It is a server setting, some shared hosters do provide you with the option do enforce HTTPS for a domain or subdomain (mine does).
That is something that is different from hosting provider to hosting provider. Some do offer this feature, others don’t. This is nothing that is part of FreshRSS. My hosting provider has the option to create a LetsEncrypt certificate in a web interface for any domain or subdomain. It is being installed and renewed automatically. It is nothing I do handle. How it is being done varies depending on where it is being done.
I am using this tool to create a database backup via a PHP script using
There is not much sense to post the actual script here because it contains sensitive data. You can find examples in the README.md within the mysqldump-php package. If you do not need a backup and if you do not intend to download such backups, there is not much sense making those MySQL dumps.
Thank you for the detailed answer!
That was exactly my initial thought.
My next task would be to use other open-source services that can make RSS feeds for websites that don’t have RSS and integrate them with FreshRSS.
I’m using GCP right now and hoping that I can do away with their free tier since RSS doesn’t consume that much bandwidth. If it starts costing more than $5, I should probably move to feedbin or a different/cheaper hosting provider.