Yeah I kinda feel like over engineering on RSS is going against the point. It's a simple tech, for a simple usage.

…for a simpler time?

I asked for tables, but the team went with fancy CSS

More like i asked for a shared config file and they went with a blockchain.

It's like tring to make very fancy coins. Go notes. Use eletronic money. But if you use coins, you usually do it because it's simple.

For those who look for a simple self hosted reader I can recommend: https://miniflux.net/

I'm running it on a RPi and it works perfectly.

Agreed; it's impossible to self-host and is therefore a non-starter.

For what it's worth, I've been pretty happy with FreshRSS (https://freshrss.org/)

All these services have free plans either if you have little traffic or if it's open source. So it's definitely possible to self host this (although maybe not completely trivial).

Disclaimer: I work at Stream (but haven't really worked on Winds)

An outage at any one of five services will stop your thing from working, and it won't necessarily be obvious what happened. Now you need to monitor five services, plus the one you actually built. Oh, and the free plans will stop being free once you cross a threshold of use, which is probably about when it becomes important to you.

If each of those services has an outage once a year, you'll get to feel all of them.

Compare to tt-rss: if your own web server and database are running (and there's an internet connection), it's working.

Those are enterprise services that offer at least four nines of availability each, probably more. AWS even advertises 11 nines for a select set of features. They should add up to a service that has an availability in the 99.98%.

Meanwhile, obtaining anything over 99.9% is usually a challenge for the amateur. Even if you are on call on every day of the year, it's very easy to go to sleep with your phone muted and wake up the next morning to discover the service is down for whatever reason.

That's not self-hosting. That's paying a cloud provider for a lot of services I don't need.

To me, self-hosting means I can (theoretically) run everything I need, on my bare-metal -- a cloud provider or cloud service (eg, RDS) then becomes a choice, not a requirement.

Suppose you swapped out every piece with a free, local one -- it'd still have the problem of being way overdesigned for what I'd need. Even if the UI looks decent.

Any recommendations for cross-platform, light RSS readers? PDF export would be _great_, but not necessary

Elfeed, if you are using Emacs. You can view most blogs and lighter websites w/ no problems with Emacs's web browser, EWW. Or you can tell Emacs w/ one variable to open links with an external browser.

Tiny tiny rss, all the way, you have great web based desktop ui and good mobile apps

Yes, agree, this is my choice of reader too.