Collie

Collie (2023) github.com/parksb/collie

Collie is a minimal RSS feed reader application running on your desktop. With Collie, you can:

• subscribe to multiple RSS/Atom feeds to organize your own news feed.
• receive a real-time notification when a new item is added to the subscribed feed. (By default, it is checked every two minutes.)
• and save the items to read again or later.

All you need is a local machine and the Internet. No virtual machine, no cloud infrastructures, no always-on database, and no account registration with privacy information required.

I’ve been getting tech news from HackerNews, Lobsters, etc. on Twitter (It’s X now, but I’ll keep calling it Twitter anyway), but many of them have been terminated due to changes in Twitter’s API policy. I went from place to place: Bluesky, Mastodon, Slack, and newsletter. However, I couldn’t settle anywhere. The social media services such as Bluesky and Mastodon had too many unnecessary features as news feed. Slack RSS was good to get the news in real-time, but the notifications mixed with other workspaces overwhelmed me. The newsletters gave me a lot of high-quality information, but not in real-time.

Then, I remembered Miniflux, the “minimalist and opinionated feed reader” that I had used past. This is the best option for my goal, but I had to pay for the hosted version or keep running docker machine on my local computer which did not have enough resources. Additionally, I didn’t need a system that maintains multi-user sessions. Eventually, I had no choice but to create my own application, and that’s why I made Collie, the minimal RSS reader just for me.