NAS joy

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One of the few things that brings me true joy these days (!) is self-hosting. Bit by bit, I’ve been moving things into my little NAS - and each little app or service gives me just a little more feeling of dopamine and control during these unsettling times.

Of course, I don’t always end up using the apps and services I self-host. For example, while I use the heck outta Plex, I set up Tautulli and then… forgot about it. Similarly for Pi-hole (I know, I know) and a few others. I have a little garden of dead Docker containers.

So it was with great pleasure that I both set up - and became addicted to - my newest service: FreshRSS.

RSSing my life

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A couple months ago, I read Cory Doctorow’s blog, “You should be using an RSS reader” and - as often happens with Cory (my lifestyle guru, I swear lol) - I was stupidly inspired. While some of Cory’s promises did not pan out - namely, I couldn’t find a way to RSS my USPS packages, and several big-name news orgs only provided a title and summary in their RSS feeds (NYT, FT) - I did end up finally finding a way to consolidate all those sporadic “cool people” I found on the internet and wanted to follow. All those blogs, newsletters, webcomics, and lesser-known news orgs. What’s even better is you can follow Bluesky and Mastodon accounts… without having a Bluesky or Mastodon account (YES, PLZ, FOR THE LOVE OF GAWD).

A brief tutorial

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Some notes for my future self, if my NAS ever dies. The process is pretty easy:

• Pull the FreshRSS Docker image from Docker Hub.
• Configuring a couple volumes to be mapped into the container: /data and /extensions. I hate this part. Years pass and I am still baffled by what Docker wants of me.
• Running the container. There’s an initial check which the container auto-runs to make sure it sees all the directories it needs. I remember some drama here of creating a user account and then promptly forgetting the password. I ended up having to go into the SQL database in the container to manually re-hash a password (LE SIGH).
• Then the fun part: adding RSS feeds!

What’s interesting is that RSS is kind of an old technology, and so most websites highlight their social media links. But, what’s even more interesting (amusing?), is that if you just add /rss/ or /feed/ to the top-level domain of some (WordPress?) websites, it auto-magically redirects to an XML-formatted RSS feed. I’m guessing that only a few “front end providers” (WordPress, Squarespace, etc) are the basis of a (vast?) majority of websites - so, as long as WordPress and Squarespace auto-handle RSS generation - then so do all their users’ websites. At least, this worked a surprising number of times.

Of course, all the crunchy intellectual web dorks of left-leaning politics loudly blared their RSS feeds - THANK YOU, to all of those. Oh yeah - and you can turn any Substack into an RSS (again, just append /feed/, as in your_fave_author.substack.com/feed).

Mobile

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Ah yes, another very important use case is the ability to see all my feeds on my phone. There are a plethora of RSS apps. For now, I’m using Tailscale to create a secure connection to my NAS when I’m not on the local network. Then, in terms of mobile front end, I used one of FreshRSS’s “recommended” apps for Android: Capy Reader. I had to input the Tailscale IP - and I remember some futzing with login passwords and ports. Capy Reader syncs reads (which is the main thing I care about); I tried deleting a feed from the Capy Reader app, but this didn’t work. Similarly, I haven’t tried adding a feed either.

Two months in…

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Two months in and my FreshRSS app is still one of my most-checked sites that I visit when I’m on my laptop.

Stuff that works well:

• All the Substack newsletters are great to read in the app. I’ve (re-)discovered Timothy Snyder, Timothy Garton Ash, and Adam Tooze. Yay, PPE life! I added a couple shortcuts from FreshRSS so that I can also immediately save an article to Pocket - which syncs automatically with my Kobo. This is as close to a perfect flow as I can get!
• Another content type that works great has been webcomics - finally an easy way to stay up to date with xkcd or SMBC.

Stuff that doesn’t work well:

• The Bluesky feeds are high volume, low content, and often relying on embedded content (which FreshRSS strips). What usually ends up happening is that some Bluesky person posts something “outrage”-inducing, but I can’t even see the embedded context, and so I click through… back to Bluesky. This back and forth is super tedious, and I’m debating just removing (all?) of the Bluesky/Mastodon stuff and just using those apps? This would be a real loss, though.
• Other high volume, low content stuff are any of the big name news orgs - e.g. Financial Times, you’re killing me here! While some news orgs - like The Intercept, Mother Jones, and ProPublica - all thankfully post their entire article in the feed, many (NYT, FT, Economist, Wired) only post the summary. This is SUPER annoying right now. I think there might be a way around this - e.g. if I need to log into each of those news orgs, maybe the full article will come through? But for now, I’ve just removed all of that noise.

Overall

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Overall, this is great. I feel empowered and informed. I feel less like an algorithm is force-feeding me news, and more like I’m seeking out what I’m interested in and then keeping tabs on it. I’m excited to keep tinkering!