As a long-time consumer of RSS feeds, I was shocked along with many others at the fairly sudden termination of Google Reader. Though there wasn’t anything extraordinarily special about GR for me, it did offer a clean, simple way to browse feeds and have the status sync across devices. Like everyone else, I set about finding a replacement, and was pretty sure I’d find one in short order that met my expectations.
Nope.
Many were major departures from the clean, boring, email-like lists that I liked and was looking for. A lot of the ones trying to mimic the old layout couldn’t deliver on performance, or a mobile app, or were a bit spendy for my liking, etc. So for over a year I floated around, trying this and that, never feeling at all settled. Then I saw reference in a Hacker News comment thread about Tiny Tiny RSS (TTR) and decided to give it a try. Great decision, and I’ve not once been left wanting for a better RSS reader.
The main hurdle for most people is that you will have to host the thing yourself. If you can stomach that, you’ll be extremely happy. Hell, your nerd circle can easily mooch off of your server if they want, since it’s easy to create individual accounts. What you’ll get in return for your efforts is a very good web and App experience (at least on Android… don’t know about iOS), delivering what you’d expect from a basic RSS aggregator, on your terms and server. All nice and GPL’d… Your RSS Reader won’t be going out of business until you quit paying your server bills.
As for maintenance? Basically zero after you get it set up. So don’t worry about that. It is well worth the effort to try out if you’re dissatisfied with your RSS situation.