This is a bit of a rant. You can skip it or, depending on you experience, you may come for the ride nodding along.
I have spent a couple of evenings improving my feed reading experience, and I’m not sure why it is so difficult in 2025 to read blogs like we did in the early 2000s. Was it bad back then? It is possible it was!
Let’s set the starting point:
- I don’t want to use a cloud service to read my blogs. I only read blog in my main PC, never in my phone –I used to, but I realised I wasn’t really reading them–.
- Although is not necessarily linked to the previous point, I don’t want to use a website either. Essentially because I don’t want to self-host a complex application I would have to maintain to just read blogs on my PC. I know I could just run some containers and whatnot on my PC, but that’s over-engineering it.
- If I’m using a native application, I want it to be native. We used to have those applications, now we have Electron and Flutter, and probably others I don’t want to know about. Let websites be websites, and native applications, well… something else.
I thought it would be easy! There aren’t that many options currently open source, working on Linux, and still maintained: do you want to download and process content from the Internet with an application that has been untouched for years? Sounds fun!
I started using Liferea over 20 years ago, but a few months ago something happened –can’t remember what, it could have been me!–, and I decided to look around to see what was out there.
And I found NewsFlash. Although not exactly: what I found because the decadence of the search engines –topic for another day– is a lot of click-bait sites saying how amazing NewsFlash is. And it really looks good, I agree!
The easiest way of using the latest version is via its official flatpak, which I’m not the biggest fan of but you can’t have it all. And slowly but surely you realise that all those sites raving about NewsFlash haven’t used it for more than 10 minutes.
Don’t get me wrong. NewsFlash it is Open Source and it keeps improving with each release. I have reported bugs, the response times of the main developer are fantastic, and I believe it has a bright future ahead. It is just that currently it isn’t a good match for my needs, and I don’t have the time –or the skills, to be honest– to contribute and make it work for me.
Hopefully I’m not unfair or not too picky, but I hit bugs importing an OPML file –that I resolved editing the sqlite database by hand, fun!–, exporting to OPML doesn’t seem to overwrite an existing file correctly and can result on a corrupt file –seems to be fixed already!–, it doesn’t seem to be rendering the fonts I choose –probably Flatpak’s fault–, and other small paper cuts I can’t remember right now.
Oh, and the last straw was when it crashed my whole system. Can’t tell 100% what happened because the system didn’t respond and I had to power-cycle, but my I3 status was reporting 800MB free from the 32GB of RAM that I have on my PC. Not bad for an application written in rust!
At the end, I’m back with Liferea. I edited ~/.config/liferea/liferea.css to:
div.content {
margin: 2em;
max-width: 50em;
}
body {
font-family: "Garamond";
font-size: 16px;
line-height: 1.5;
color: rgb(240, 240, 240);
background-color: rgb(32, 32, 32);
}
And with GTK on a dark theme, looks decent enough. I’m back to a happy place, and the tools I use work and I’m not frustrated any more.
Then perhaps we should take a look to the current state of the feeds out there:
- RSS is still popular, although it has many limitations. And I know it because: I use RSS! At very least it needs some extensions from Atom, but it is common that the feed uses the post creation date in
pubDateinstead of when it was modified last time resulting on updates to the post never showing in the feed reader. I am conflicted on this one: is it the RSS’ fault or the reader’s limitation? I don’t know, but it is hard to detect this unfortunately. We should be using Atom instead because it makes distinction between published and updated. - It is not common, but some people –including me– like tinkering, and we end with bad implementations of RSS or Atom –e.g. the images won’t load on the feed readers–. You can contact the author, but let’s be real: people are busy and I didn’t get results, so no images on that blog.
- Some feeds don’t include the full post. I don’t know why, but back in the day this was because the blog post had ads and those don’t show in the feed. NewsFeed deals with it beautifully and turns out Liferea can do it as well –although is not 100% consistent applying its theme, but it is close enough–. This “retrieve the post from the web” works also with the two previous problems, but then feels like we are failing a bit a syndicating content.
Finally, it is kind of difficult to find new interesting blogs.
Back in the early 2000s we had blogrolls and comments, and both were an excellent way to build your own community of blogs and find new content organically.
Unfortunately all that was ruined because Google’s dominance in the search space and ads, and their pagerank that lead to SEO and spam, and links had value beyond their original intent of linking content. Having comments on your blog wasn’t useful anymore, because it was mostly spam, and most of us removed the functionality.
Similarly people started to drop the blogrolls, because all that perceived value on the outgoing links. Which I don’t think it matters anymore because Google buried blogs deep in their search results, so you may as well have links. If I stopped having a blogroll is because the blogs I was reading disappeared, mostly. And I lost the community part around blogging.
Since about a year that my blogroll is back, and we’ll see about the community. Go and check it, you may find blogs that you like.
If you got to this point, I hope it wasn’t too bad. Despite all these arguably small things, I love it and I’m slowly building a list of blogs that I enjoy reading, and I’m even writing about it!