I've been using one of the numerous "RSS to Email" programs for the past 20 years.
To me that's peak usability, I can use my mail workflow to have cross-device state, I can use my mail clients tagging and spam support to filter, and I have a reasonably good searching facility too.
Some sites only include "teasers" rather than full posts, but they're a minority.
theoldreader was built to be as close as possible to Google Reader. And from an interface PoV it's really close. Problem is that without critical mass you can't do the social features.
Gotcha. I guess where our use cases differ is that I use only one RSS reader so don’t care about sharing its state with other readers. That’d be super handy if I did, though.
My main points for running a self-hosted RSS service are:
1. It updates the feeds even though I'm not online on any device - this is an issue if your only RSS reader is on a desktop you turn off. You might miss items on feeds that roll over after X entries
2. I can read from multiple devices.
I mainly read on my laptop, big screen for big articles and all that. But sometimes I want to check the feeds on my phone, but don't want to wade through 420 articles I've already read on my actual computer -> syncing with single source is essential.
3. I can easily run feed hydrators on the same machine as FreshRSS.
For example: My HN feed is automatically filtered by the hydrator based on comment count, vote count, key words etc. Stuff that's not in the feed. It also grabs the linked article's OpenGraph data and inserts it to the feed so that I can get a preview of the article without opening the link at all.
I've been using Feedly ever since the death of Google Reader. If you ignore all the ai bullshit it's simple to use and I've had no issues with cross-device sync.
We used to live counting the days in awe for the surprisingly new Google invention or release.
Then, one by one, Google started killing more services than it was announcing (Wave, News, +, etc), and enshittifying with spyware those that were still up
There are plenty of RSS reader apps, but there are very few with good cross-device sync - let alone self-hosted cross-device sync.