@itsfoss
I've been using it for a while and it's pretty awesome. The one feature that I really miss though is being able to 🔍 search for specific articles and texts. That's a deal breaker for me so stick with 🍮 Handy News Reader.
Yes, it’s just Day 3 of 2024, and I’m already giving you work to do.
Today, we cover three neat, new-ish, services you can self-host to either use directly, or hack on to customize.
The decentralization movement is picking up speed, non-tech-y humans are also starting to switch to “lurker” mode vs. provide content to Big Tech for free, and organizations like Google and Amazon are starting to clean house by killing off apps and services that do not generate ad revenue.
This makes 2024 an ideal year to exercise some self-hosting muscles!
(IT IS SO NICE TO HAVE PROPER CODE BLOCK SUPPORT AGAIN)
The post discusses the importance of self-hosting in 2024, focusing on three services: Feedi, MicroBin, and skeetgen. The author emphasizes the growing trend of decentralization and the shift of users from content providers to lurkers. The post also highlights the actions of big tech companies like Google and Amazon, who are discontinuing apps and services that do not generate ad revenue.
The first service, Feedi, is a self-hosted feed reader developed by Facundo Olano. The author provides a detailed overview of Olano’s journey, from career burnout to rediscovering the joy of software development through the creation of Feedi. The post also discusses the broader themes of the software industry, the need for an open and independent web, and the quest to regain control over information in the digital age. The author provides a technical overview of Feedi, including its features, setup, and potential for customization.
The second and third services discussed are MicroBin and skeetgen. MicroBin is a self-hosted pastebin that offers features like server-side and client-side encryption, file uploads, raw text serving, QR code support, URL shortening and redirection, and private and public uploads. Skeetgen, on the other hand, allows users to generate a publicly viewable archive of their Bluesky posts on their own kit, providing an opportunity to learn about web apps, a new Bluesky/ATProto JS library, and SolidJS.
Before we get to the tech, I want to take a moment to give a quick overview of why @facundoolano decided to take on the project/journey, as it may provide some inspiration for folks at the start of this new year.
In “Reclaiming the Web with a Personal Reader,” Facundo Olano delves into his personal journey, marked by a phase of career burnout, which led him to rediscover the joy in software development. This reconnection was fueled in a project to create a personal feed reader (the aforementioned feedi). The blog post isn’t just about building some new side project, though. Olano hits notes on broader themes such as the nuances of the software industry, the burgeoning need for an open and independent web, and an introspective quest to regain control over the influx of information in today’s digital age.
The story begins with an awesome decision to quit Twitter and migrate to Mastodon. This shift was pivotal, as it dropped the author hip-deep into the IndieWeb movement and the concept of social readers, which influenced the vision for feedi. The intent was to craft a feed reader that not only mimicked the home feeds of Twitter and Mastodon but also maintained a consistent aesthetic and functionality, irrespective of the data source. Python was the chosen language for this endeavor, (despite the baggage of environmental and dependency hades challenges).
In designing feedi, the Olano opted for a monolithic web application structure. This structure incorporated server-side rendering libraries like htmx and hyperscript, supported by a SQLite database. Interestingly, the author chose to initially forego writing tests, prioritizing rapid development and experimentation instead. This approach reflects a blend of pragmatic and creative software development philosophies.
The culmination of this journey is feedi itself, which, for several months, has served as Facundo’s personal “front page of the internet.” This creation is more than just a technical achievement; it represents a curated, personalized approach to information consumption, challenging the status quo of how we interact with the web. Through feedi, the author not only rekindled their passion for software development but also reshaped their own digital experience.
Now, there is no requirement that every side project must have such an origin/back-story. And, it’s 100% cool to have tiny ones, vs. some monolith like feedi (it’s not that yuge). But, being able to peek behind the curtain to see the “why” and not just the “how” was refreshing.
Back to the tech drop.
You can see an Arc split-view of an instance of feedi running on my MBPro in an Orbstack (docker) container up in the section header.
Since I’m a big fan of temporal feeds, the idea to forego the “email client” look/feel that virtually every other feed reader has was super intriguing (though, I pretty much use Inoreader this way already, often hiding the sidebar and just scrolling down the temporal feed). The other core features of feedi include:
Easy local and self-hosted environment setup.
Mobile optimized UI.
Mastodon home, hashtag, and notification streams support.
Custom parsers for Reddit, Github and Goodreads.
Hackable RSS parsers and ad hoc scrapers.
Smart feed sorting options (highlight infrequent sources, auto mark as read).
Local article reading and preview using Mozilla’s reader mode.
Send to Kindle device support.
I did the:
$ git clone https://github.com/facundoolano/feedi.git$ cd feedi$ make docker
dance and launched a local instance in the background:
I’m using an alternate port since I already have bits running on 5000. Just hit localhost:#### and you’re good-to-go. You can also just run it without a container.
You can authenticate to as many Mastodon instances as you like, and you have full Mastodon features like boosting and fav’ing. Within each entry (Mastodon or regular RSS) you can see the JSON for the feedi record and for the source RSS. And, there are many keyboard shortcuts for power users.
You can even import any existing OPML (or CSV) feed files.
I’ve begun to set up “buckets” (folders) for GitUgh, Reddit, Mastodon, and “Newsletters” to get a feel for the app. While it would mean “work” (and, work in Python, no less), This could be a solid replacement for something like Inoreader or Feedly. The Python foundation would also make it possible to add in some advanced NLP (trying hard to not just slap an “AI” sticker on everything) features, and it would also be pretty simple to hack-in some of the advanced notification features I rely on in Inoreader.
There is no authentication by default, but the repo has full instructions for enabling that if you want to expose this to the big, bad internets (I suggest using a Caddy reverse proxy).
You can set it up via Docker or just cargo install microbin plus some environment variable tweaking. I’d suggest not using Bash/curl Docker method as that’s opaque (I know you aren’t going to read the main and downstream scripts before running it).
It has what one might expect from a modern, self-hosted pastebin:
Entirely self-contained, single-file executable
Server-side and client-side encryption
File uploads
Raw text serving
QR code support
URL shortening and redirection
Private and public, editable and uneditable, automatically and never expiring uploads
I’d highly suggest just using this as a personal or team pastebin via Tailscale vs. slap it on the internet.
The section header is a snapshot of it running locally in an OrbStack (docker) container.
Short and sweet, skeetgen lets us generate a publicly viewable archive of our Bluesky posts on your own kit, vs. rely on the finally available public Bluesky post viewing feature.
Sometimes, briefly, I miss my days as an influencer online. That was never my plan, but as you know, the former Twitter used Algorithms. The more engagement you made, the higher your presence became. My followers have always been higher than the amount I follow. The more I follow, the less I see, caught up in a fast moving stream of (mostly garbage) ReTweets. #ENGAGEMENT is not Boosting or Liking, it's responding, dialogue, comments, and conversation. #Influencer#Klout#Twitter#Gifts#Thread
I no longer speak German. I recognize a few words still, took it in school.Many Germans take English in School & can speak it better than me.
My French is also failing; the only place I spoke French was on Ship & Ottawa/Hull.
I have no one IRL that I can converse with now.
My PC Browser translates seamlessly.
Foreign papers are easy to follow; I have every major source bookmarked. Up To The Minute updates for all disasters & a #NewsReader! You don't need Twitter for #NewsSources + #Feedly
Somewhere on a #mediastudies course a student (or perhaps staff researcher?) is organising a piece of comparative work looking at how the #MorningShow and the #Newsreader each (and differently) are telling the story of power & #gender in the TV #newsroom.
Certainly one is set in contemporary #America & the other is set in 1980's #Australia, but the covergence of themes is pretty striking (watching them back-to-back).
And if no one is doing it; there's a project ready to go for someone!
I really have to push back against these three ideas, that
Mastodon is easy to sign up for
Mastodon is easy to use
Mastodon has an app
Because
No it's not,
No it's not, and
The apps universally suck ass.
This is not to say that this will remain static in the future; to the contrary, I expect it will not, but right now? The reality is that #Mastodon puts roadblocks in the way of ease of use, partly by design, partly by neglect or incompetence (hard to tell the difference).
I'd also like to remind people that #Mastodon and the #fediverse really aren't anything new. The concepts of distributed communication between independent servers behind it are as old as #Usenet, and then some.
I've said before, it really would probably have made better sense to simply concentrate development efforts on #INNd and #newsreader clients. We used to have really great clients, but they fell by the wayside, and the #fediverse is just reinventing the wheel with a Twittier UI.