For the longest time I've been using Feedly as my RSS feed aggregator. This is a reasonable service if you don't mind the ads that are randomly interspersed with your feeds, the persistent attempts at upselling you the paid version, the slow encroachment of AI features that I for one don't want, and so on. Plus the fact that a US company gets to see which RSS feeds I consume. Time for something new …
The current issue of c't, the premier German IT magazine, contains a big feature on RSS feed readers and aggregators. This made me aware of FreshRSS, an open-source RSS aggregator that was said to be both powerful and easy to install for self-hosting. It took me less than half an hour or so to construct and debug a Podman configuration based on the Docker installation instructions on the FreshRSS home page and bring up my own FreshRSS instance – on feeds.pingucloud.de if you must know (get in touch if I know you and you'd like an account).
We must give props to the Feedly folks for offering an OPML export feature for your feed configuration. This can be imported very easily to FreshRSS, and once you have clicked away all the old articles you have already read on Feedly, you're set for reading new stuff on FreshRSS. FreshRSS can be extensively configured (way more so than Feedly) and I've only scratched the surface of what seems to be possible. Oh, and there are extensions too!
The Feedly OPML export contained a bunch of feeds that no longer worked, while others could not be retrieved from FreshRSS because they were based on obsolete non-HTTPS URLs which redirect to HTTPS ones, and by default FreshRSS – unlike presumably Feedly – doesn't seem to follow redirections when fetching feed data. Instead it returns an error, which can appear strange. But this is easily fixed. I did clear out a bunch of old feeds that no longer exist and that Feedly had helpfully hidden away out of sight.
I'm looking forward to trying this some more, but I guess I'll be sticking with it if only because I prefer self-hosting my own stuff. FreshRSS is pretty lightweight and it doesn't even seem to move the needle as far as CPU and disk usage is concerned on the server, so that's OK too. Thank you, c't (once again)!