I read a lot of articles on all kinds of topics; it's both fun and informative. This world is so full of wondrous things, after all.
I had a setup that worked well for years. And therein lies the problem: I want to do things the same way, but various companies keep pulling rugs from under my feet. So over the past few months, I basically had to rebuild everything from scratch, this time on my own hardware.

What I need

This is one of the oldest topics on this blog: there are articles I wrote over a dozen years ago, like this one; but no need to actually read it, it's pretty outdated by now. All the tools changed, but my desired flow remains the same. I want to:

1. Find things to read. Best done in RSS or social networks.
2. Read things later. When I find something interesting but don't have the time right now, I need a place to put it, where I can find it later (and archive it after reading).
3. Revisit things I've read. This is what the archives are for.
4. Automation is appreciated (see below).

I've used the same setup for many years: Feedly for RSS feeds, the Palabre app to read RSS on Android, Pocket for keeping a to-read list and an archive, and IFTTT for automation. Using IFTTT I've set things up so that when I liked something in Feedly (or Twitter, for that matter), the link was automatically transferred to Pocket. Pocket was my reading list, and I also liked the text-to-speech feature: I would go for a walk and listen to a very long article because staring at trees beats staring at a tiny screen. I even had a nice dashboard to visualize various things about my library.

"Platform decay"

My IFTTT use cases kept diminishing, and IFTTT kept limiting the free tier. Now I only have one 'recipe' left on there - the one moving starred articles from Feedly to Pocket. I think I'll delete my account soon.

Mozilla has been doing inexplicable things to Pocket - the service just kept getting worse and less reliable. Most infuriatingly, when I used the app it seemed to be working normally, but didn't actually save any changes, so I had to redo them multiple times.

Feedly still is fine, I guess. They keep introducing various AI features and the like, but they're easy enough to ignore, especially since I've been reading via the Palabre app most often and virtually haven't ever used any official Feedly app. But even Palabre is dated now, long since unsupported, and can't even be found on the Play Store today.

What I use now

I've been hesitant to switch from Feedly because it's been quite reliable. I've tried FreshRSS, but didn't much like it and bounced right off. But part of Feedly's magic was how well it worked within my system, and now that every other part of my toolchain has been broken...

I'm trying out Miniflux. It's quite minimal but in a very deliberate way. It has everything one needs for reading RSS, it works well on both big screens and phones, it has a PWA. I've tried a couple of Android apps that can connect to it over the Fever API but haven't liked any, so I'm mostly using the PWA.

I'm using Karakeep, recently renamed from Hoarder, as a Pocket replacement. Honestly, for me, it's an "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" kind of situation. It does many things well: I could easily import my Pocket bookmarks, even though unfortunately no metadata besides tags were preserved^[1]. It extracts the text of web pages and archives it, which is great; it even does full webpage snapshots on demand. There's a browser plugin. The option to have LLMs generate tags or summaries is also handy.

But many of the features I want are still missing: most importantly, the Android app is lacking. I can't access the extracted text on mobile, making reading on my phone a lot more annoying than it needs to be. This is maybe 90% of what I want from the application. There also aren't any text-to-speech capabilities. And archiving articles takes a few more taps than it should.

And as for the automation - nothing yet. Miniflux does support sharing to a bunch of services, but Karakeep isn't among them. There's a feature request for it already. Either that gets added eventually, or I'll kluge something together using n8n or something. At the very least, I'd like to get the auto-import of starred items from Miniflux working.

To sum up: This is what I ended up with for now. It might change, or it might not, but I definitely won't be going back to the broken Pocket. We'll see.

And happy Easter to all y'all.