RSS readers that look/feel like Tweetdeck?

October 28, 2022 10:56 PM

I'm looking to extricate myself from Twitter, but there are still too many sources I follow that post news primarily or solely via Twitter. I'd like to start ingesting them as RSS feeds instead, but there's no reader I've found that acts like Tweetdeck, and building one from scratch is a lot. Are there any RSS clients that essentially reproduce Tweetdeck's user interface?

I hit upon an idea: use a Nitter instance to pull RSS feeds from specific Twitter accounts, and feed them into an RSS reader. Voila! Except every single RSS reader I've tried so far has made for a poor reading experience. A lot of them use UI paradigms more suited to long-form articles, like a list of blog posts or an email client, but that's not the use case I really have in mind. Here's a quick rundown of things I'd like to see:

1. View full RSS item, with proper working links. A lot of RSS readers (Feedly, Inoreader, etc.) allow you to view posts in a compact view showing summaries of posts. However, these summaries strip all HTML, meaning any links embedded in these posts don't work. You'd have to click on an individual post to view it in a detail view first, and only then do you get access to links.
2. Turn embedded images into thumbnails. Twitter/Tweetdeck have figured out how to display multiple embedded images as a thumbnail or grid of thumbnails that can be individually expanded. RSS readers don't do this; instead they display each image full-size as a list. This means any post with an image, let alone multiple images, takes up substantially more vertical screen space than it would on Twitter. This makes it really difficult to read short posts with images quickly.
3. Ability to display multiple narrow columns with different feeds. The magazine/feed views some RSS readers have display posts in a chronological order, which is good! But then they take up the entire width of the page and thanks to the aforementioned image issue, images utterly dominate the display and the text becomes much harder to pick out. Narrower columns would really help with this. Plus, multiple columns means I can display multiple curated groups of feeds at once. I could then categorize feeds by subject matter and display each one in a separate column.
4. Display all posts from multiple feeds in a single merged list. RSS readers seem to think I want to only ever consume content organized by site. I really don't. Show me everything merged into one feed, organized chronologically.

The more I dig into the current state of RSS readers, the more despair I feel. I've even thought about building my own client in Electron from scratch because there just doesn't seem to be anything out there that fits, but I'm too new to Electron to do more than really basic stuff (I can't even get images hosted on an external server to load!). So while I hold out very little hope that anyone will actually be able to answer this question, I have to try. Is there anything I can do to just have Tweetdeck, but for RSS?

posted by chrominance to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Best answer: Am playing with start.me right now and you may well be able to get what you want there.
posted by Iteki at 1:03 AM on October 29, 2022

The beta is just opening up to wider numbers, but you should check out Readwise Reader.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 5:52 AM on October 29, 2022

check out Dave Winer's work on FeedLand and "rivers". He is one of the creators of RSS and is really interested in open web solutions; some of what you want sounds like work he's done. He's open to feedback too
posted by TimHare at 10:45 AM on October 29, 2022

Response by poster: Played around with Start.me and... it's surprisingly close! It also works well for mixing short-post feeds like Twitter with article-style feeds from places like Substack, so that's a bonus. The main thing it doesn't do on my list at all, unfortunately, is allow me to click on links embedded in a post description, and you actually have to click out all the way to the original web link to do so. That said, this is probably the closest I've come so far to an ideal solution.

Signed up for Readwise and started looking into FeedLand, so thanks for those recs too. Too early to say whether they'll fit my needs and from reading their mission statements it kind of sounds like they're intended for different use cases, but what's a few more options to investigate?

Still looking for more options, so please keep them coming!
posted by chrominance at 12:41 PM on October 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Oh, though one downside of FeedLand: you HAVE to use Twitter to log in, which kind of defeats the purpose of trying to distance myself from Twitter.
posted by chrominance at 12:42 PM on October 29, 2022

So does this mean you don't want something like Tweeten, which very closely replictes Tweetdeck?
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 1:39 PM on October 29, 2022

I love NetNewsWire now that is it back in the original developer's hands.
posted by terrapin at 2:40 PM on October 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: So does this mean you don't want something like Tweeten, which very closely replictes Tweetdeck?

That's correct, though it's also good to know about Tweetdeck replacements (I'm currently using TweetDUCK for Windows as my Twitter client). But in this case I'm specifically looking for something that ingests RSS feeds. If I don't find a good answer for this one, then I think my options are to build my own RSS reader or stick with Twitter, but I'd really rather have the option to bail and still have access to the content from Twitter accounts I care about until they migrate over to whatever the next big thing is.
posted by chrominance at 6:17 PM on October 29, 2022

Best answer: Back again. So the solution I ended up using isn't an RSS reader at all; it's Nitter. Not totally ideal, but essentially the same level of dependency on Twitter that the RSS solution I was originally looking for had.

Nitter doesn't currently support following people and viewing a home feed, and it doesn't do Twitter logins (I think by design). However, there is a neat trick you can do to get something vaguely similar: Nitter allows you to chain multiple usernames into a single search query. So now I have a pinned tab in my browser with a few Twitter accounts that haven't yet migrated to other services, and another tab with Mastodon. It works pretty well, and I've managed to leave Tweetduck closed for over a week without really even thinking about it.
posted by chrominance at 10:32 PM on December 7, 2022

Response by poster: Oh, one other thing: I did actually get a decent way into building my own RSS reader via Electron. But honestly, it's a lot of work to even get it remotely as functional as an actual Twitter/Mastodon/RSS/etc. client. Fun if you need a practical project to teach yourself Electron development, though.
posted by chrominance at 10:33 PM on December 7, 2022