How I Consume RSS in 2021

I was just looking at my iOS Screen Time report and noticed that I spend a good portion of my phone time reading RSS feeds. I'm guessing that's unusual and I thought it might be good to share my latest setup.

When Google Reader shut down in 2013 I installed Tiny Tiny RSS on an AWS server and used that regularly in a desktop browser without really touching it again until 2018. (Beyond regular OS updates.) I wrote about that update—Newsreader Update—which opened up reading feeds in a nice interface on my iPhone. I figured I'd go another five years without touching it, but no. Some quirk of the app was annoying enough that I looked at updating tt-rss and there has been a big improvement: Dockerization.

The salty folks who created and maintain tt-rss have packaged everything up with Docker so it's easier to maintain. Here's the tt-rss docker compose version. Now I have this running on a $5/month Digital Ocean server and the code updates with every reboot. The one piece I wasn't sure about was configuring the web server inside Docker. But it turned out to be pretty easy by setting up a reverse proxy on the host OS.

Anyway, I realize that not everyone is going to want to reverse proxy their way to reading RSS on their iPhone. But you can consume RSS feeds in 2021 with a little work. I still think having control of your primary news feed without all of the sorting, attention, and social alogrithms is the best way keep up with the web.
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