FeedThing is a django-based feed reader. I created it when Bloglines was shutting down because I didn't like Google Reader and then of course that shut down anyway.

FeedThing supports all common feed flavours - RSS, Atom and JSON Feed. It works just as well on mobile as on desktop browsers.

FeedThing treats feeds in the specific manner that I believe to be right.

• Regular (I want to read everything by this author) feeds are displayed with all the unread posts in chronological order.
• High traffic news feeds display all the posts in reverse chronological order, paginated 20 posts to a page.
• Regular feeds that have been read up to date display their old posts in reverse chronological order, paginated.

So you can use FeedThing as both a catch-up, never-miss-a-post service, and a Dave Winer-esque river of news at the same time.

Feeds can be placed into folders in which case all the feeds in the folder are treated as if they were a single feed. There is no further nesting, folders are a single level deep.

A single FeedThing installation can support multiple users, each with their own settings and list of feeds. Embarrassingly, there is no UI to create those users just now.

I have used this as my daily RSS reader for over a decade. It is probably missing features that other readers have, but nothing that I have ever missed.

Enjoy.

FeedThing is a pretty simple Python 3 / Django 2.2 application. There are a few external dependencies that need pip installing (listed in requirements.txt)

The django settings.py file is not quite complete. It imports some of its settings from settings_server.py which is listed in .gitignore because it is installation specific. There is an example.

Host it as you would any other django app. I had it running for years under fastcgi and it was fine. I currently run it behind gunicorn & nginx which is better.

Once it is running, in order to keep it ticking over and reading feeds, something needs to keep hitting /refresh/ or, better still, calling the management command manage.py refreshfeeds

I have that set up as a cron job every five minutes. This was a cheesy way to work around the severe lameness of my last hosting, but its working well enough that I still do it that way. Celery beat would work too.

Make yourself the first login using manage.py createsuperuser

And that's it.