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FreshRSS, honorable mention favorite tech thing of 2025
An honorable mention goes out this year to the application FreshRSS, which I’ve been hosting on my Raspberry Pi computer for the last three years. What’s different this year is that I’m using the FreshRSS web interface. Previously I used FreshRSS as nothing more than a back-end for other applications, namely NetNewsWire on Mac and iOS. And as I look to disentangle myself from Apple’s platforms, I switched to using FreshRSS in the browser. Part of it is that I never found a good RSS application for Linux. There are a few, and I thought they were awful in one way or another, either looking like they were fresh out of 1999 or not working in a way that I liked.
As I used my Linux laptop more, I found myself using FreshRSS in the browser and then I bookmarked it on all my devices, and I really liked it. It even looks and works well on mobile. Normally I prefer a native application to a web application because I feel like it’s a waste of system resources to run a browser when I could have a native application running locally. In the case of RSS, it feels different because the content of all of it is web-based, so viewing it in a browser feels native to that content. When I open links from the RSS feed, I’m going to open it in a browser anyway. RSS feed items are all of the internet and on the internet and it makes sense to have it all in a web browser from the get-go.
This year in particular has required a different approach to media. My country, the great United States of America, elected a new (old) President, and this guy is far more interested in creating headlines and spectacle than running things well. He needs to be the center of attention for something every single week, if not every single day. And for the last 12-13 years that he’s been in politics, the mainstream media can’t help but play into it. Internet media drinks up traditional media and dissects it into thousands of tiny bits of re-packaged out-of-context twaddle. It’s not a sane person’s quest to sift through that, especially when the sifting is aided my algorithms tuned for maximum emotional reaction and engagement.
It’s more important than ever that I can pick and choose my sources and put them into a system that lets me manage my reading, group my sources however I like, mark news items as read to get them out of the way, or star them to reference later. It puts some control back in my hands rather than being the recipient of a feeding tube. And I find that control has been really healthy and wholesome.
And that’s why I give FreshRSS a 2025 Favorite Things honorable mention. Because of the capabilities of the software, which is very good and reliable, and also that the media landscape in which I live makes this kind of thing necessary.
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