My own problem with services like this is that I don't want to tell their owners what blogs I read. It's a privacy concern.

I'd feel much more comfortable using a standalone tool that I could run on my own laptop (ideally one that didn't require running a web server or even a web browser).

To practice SwiftUI, I was building an rss/feed reader but immediately realized anything you're going to display needs to be web-rendered. Or rather, to avoid a web browser (like WKWebView) the product is so neutered that it's not all that compelling.

Even stripping everything out but plaintext with an HTML parser to put it in a text view, I realized I could wrap the links with native Cocoa labels that act as hyperlinks. And then do the same with images. Hmm, what about tables and stuff? Soon I realized, why would I even want this? It's annoying to visit the origin site when the RSS reader can just render it, and it kinda defeats the purpose.

pmoriarty

For many years I've used and continue to use an RSS reader named newsboat[1][2] (which is an actively developed fork of the venerable newsbeuter, which I used for years before that).

It's a feature-rich RSS reader that runs completely in the terminal, presenting text-only views of each RSS feed.

The links open in the browser of your choice (which for me is a text-only version of emacs-w3m, which I also run exclusively in the terminal).

However, some RSS items can be read in their entirety within the RSS reader[3], and does not require the opening of any links. This is my preferred method of consuming RSS.

[1] - https://newsboat.org/

[2] - https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat

[3] - ie. those RSS items for which the author has chosen to make their entire article/post available over RSS instead of merely posting a teaser and requiring browsing to their website to read the rest