As you all know, I’m a big fan of Chris Wellons’ Elfeed package for reading my RSS feed. There’s a lot to like. Wellons reimagined what an RSS reader should be and organized it around search. Most of the time, the search is implicit, defaulting to “show me the unread entries for the last 6 months” but you can specify anything you want.
The other day I saw this tweet from Karl Voit
My favorite #RSS #Atom aggregator is down at the moment 😢 https://t.co/VZAM4mvjwP pic.twitter.com/Pkkn96qvcF
— Karl Voit (@n0v0id) June 24, 2021
and it made me realize another advantage of Elfeed: it never goes down. Or at least if it does it’s because your computer or Internet connection is dead.
That’s not to beat up on NewsBlur. Every cloud service—even those run by giant corporations with hoards of first rate engineers like Apple, Google, or Microsoft—has periods of downtime. The thing about Elfeed is that it doesn’t depend on any remote servers other than those hosting the sites in your feed. If one of those goes down, you simply don’t get its articles until it comes back up.
Elfeed holds every article in every one of your feeds in its local index making it easy to revisit any article you’ve ever seen. Even so, after four years my index is only 162 Megs. None of that depends on anything external to work.