I’ve been looking at self-hosting (on managed servers rather than a Raspberry Pi beneath the stairs) an alternative to Feedbin. I always like the idea of self-hosting, and Feedbin costs $5 a month. It’s a great service, but $5 could get you two or three low-resource apps on Pika Pods, such as Miniflux, FreshRSS, Wallabag among other FOSS (free and open source software) options.
There’s a real mix in terms of quality – finding a web-based RSS reader that can match Feedbin’s features and usability is nigh on impossible, although I may try Miniflux, especially if I can wrangle its appearance into shape. I’ve used – and liked – Wallabag before, but, unlike Instapaper, it lacks text tweaking options. While I’d rather not host my read-it-later articles with a third party – when you think about it, there’s a lot of personal info in there – Instapaper has a good UI, a free tier and is promising Kobo integration later this summer. That is a killer feature for me – be interesting to see whether they bundle it into the premium tier.
(Recommend Pika Pods, though. Good range of apps and they offer a $5 credit. Even better, they don’t ask for card details upfront, which means you can try it out properly without having to remember to unsubscribe. It’s the sort of thing that makes you well-inclined towards a service.)
I toured some other apps. Etherpad has an attractive, minimal editing interface, but I couldn’t figure out how to save a document (or whether you’re even meant to). Readeck is a slick web clipper which probably required a lot more processing power to import my Instapaper articles. HedgeDoc is a solid online Markdown editor and previewer. Lots of interesting stuff, but nothing that made me think I’d definitely commit to it.
I did like the look of Haven, a sort of Facebook clone. Groups are private, and the only feed is a set of RSS-fueled articles selected by the admins. That’s a really good idea for groups that want a simple, familiar interface for privately sharing photos and updates without the connectivity offered by ActivityPub.
Unfortunately, Haven suffers from the usual single-developer problem, where their back end skills are obviously good, but they can’t write accessible, semantic HTML that’s easy to style. I didn’t need to discover another web app that doesn’t make it easy to add alt text to images. Still, I find this an interesting enough idea to think about raising issues, or even making a pull request. Can’t be that hard to add a main element to an erb template, can it?