Using Nextcloud news instead of Inoreader/Feedly

I've been using Feedly in the past and Inoreader for the last couple of years. Both are great webbased ways to manage my news consumption based on RSS feeds. The functionality is great, and the costs are OK to me. But the idea that someone, somewhere, is keeping track of all the news sources that interest me and the news headlines that I actually click: not very appealing.

I tried using FreshRSS in the past, in a Yunohost install I was running at some point. But it lacked in multi device support at the time at least. So reading things on one device, did not mark them as read on others. Or it was just to cumbersome/slow to get an updated feed.

So I was thinking of revisiting FreshRSS, but then I remembered that I still had a self-managed Nextcloud running, and it too has an app to manage your RSS feeds. I exported my OPML file from Inoreader and imported it into Nextcloud news. Then I spent some time tweaking Nextcloud to have working cron jobs, actual http2 support in apache2 and then some. Not too bad but it did take some tweaking. And BOOM: great experience on the laptop. Not the nice magazine look with pictures I was used to with Inoreader, but a quickly loading/rendering collection of headlines that I could easily click through.

Then I tried accessing it from Firefox on my iPhone: MEH. For every headline it showed, it only used a single line and then cut it of. Making all headlines quite unreadable. So that was nothing to be happy about.

But then I found an iPhone app that would just sync up to my Nextcloud news instance, with proper rendering of news headlines and even an excerpt. Some images too. And really easy controls to get things marked as read etc. I spend a voluntary amount of money to keep the developer of Nextnews happy and developing.

So I'm satisfied for now. I will see how this works for me over the coming weeks.