FreshRSS

After some years with TinyTinyRSS I decided to switch due to the crude community (see my post for TinyTinyRSS/TT-RSS). After a closer look at all alternatives I could find I have now concluded that FreshRSS is the most mature alternative as of today.

Evaluation

This is some of the factors that has been important for me during my evaluation:

• This application have 11 contributors on Github, most alternatives have 2-4. Only 3 of the comitters are very active and has been so for a long period of time.

• The activity on GitHub is high and has been active for a long period of time.

• I collect a lot of feeds and like the history thus it is crucial to be able to view read items, this is not the case of some of the alternatives like Selfoss.

• I like to organize my feeds into groups, most alternatives can do this and FreshRSS can do as well.

• Some feeds I like to keep a short history of, some I like to keep a longer history for. FreshRSS uses a default setting that can be adjusted for individual feeds. It is combined with the least number of items to save, e.g. scarp all items older than 6 month but keep at least 500 items in this feed. It can be old but will not be empty.

• In TT-RSS I used tags for things I like to remember or republish. This is not possible in FreshRSS at the moment. I can mark items as favourite though and I will need to manage with that.

• The installation was flawless

• I want this for my family, multi user is a must

Cool thing I did not know I might like is that I can select what feeds to include in the general "all items" list. Also cool thing is that there is a visual theme selector so I can see an example of what it is going to look like. 6 themes are included by default.

The overall impression (still after a very shorty period of time) is that I am satisfied and will continue the experiment and evaluation. All other alternatives I tested was rejected and I scraped the installation quite early.

Alternatives that I rejected

The Alternatives I looked at was:

• http://selfoss.aditu.de/ Installed and tested. SelfOss is nice but not complete. Seems to be for one person only. No way to view history of read items.

• https://github.com/brainfoolong/nreeda Tested the demo. To simple. Does not show all items in feed if feed is long. No way to read read articles.

• https://www.commafeed.com Java application which is supported on my web hotel. I never installed this one.

• http://rnews.sourceforge.net/ Latest news 2009, appears to be abandoned. I never installed this one.

• http://readerself.com/ Cannot pass registration screen after install. Gave up and scrapped the installation.

• https://github.com/xbmcfreak/phppaper Did never try to install because the ToDo-list on the home page have some important stuff in it like Mark-read and Search. I decided that this was yet to immature for my taste.

[Edited by ErikR, March 22]