I’m a self-hosted enthusiast. I try to self-host everything. I really don’t like the idea of Mega-Corps owning, farming and selling my data. Fuck that.
When I began this journey more than 15 years ago, I started with RSS. The first app I ever self-hosted was TinyTinyRss. Since then, I’ve hosted more than 100 apps either to use or to test. As of today I host over 30 apps that I use on a daily basis, all to prevent some big-ass tech company from harvesting my data.
My journey began humbly enough, I wanted my own RSS aggregator. And TT-RSS met that need.
Forever.
Until last week.
I have had few problems with TT-RSS. Exactly 2, if we’re counting. The first about 6 years ago when the dev decided to switch from mysql to postgresql. No biggie, unless you don’t tell your users that you are dropping support for the world’s most popular database.
When my install failed to work, I jumped on the github issues pages and started asking questions, and the answer from the dev was, basically, “My app, my decisions.” Not exactly user friendly.
A few years later I ran into another issue and went to the dev’s forum to ask for a solution. The dev himself answered my post with a declaration that I must be stupid if I didn’t know how to fix the issue, stating basically that “Any idiot would know to press ALT+F5 to fix the issue.”
As you can imagine, I had long since pressed the revered key sequence. With no result. So when I explained that to the dev, he insulted me, told me I was the reason he hated app users, and banned me from his forum.
Nice.
So, in the last year I’ve been giving other RSS apps a go, and I finally settled on CommaFeed. It was started just before Google Reader was killed off, and has been in active development for about 12 years.
It does was it promises, and is compatible with Android apps that use the Fever API.
Saying goodbye to the first app I ever self-hosted has been bittersweet, but I’m excited to see where this journey will end.