Put the phone down

First, a brief detour into my browsing and reading habits. I subscribe to a lot of feeds (check out my blogroll!) and going through my RSS reader gives me a similar dopamine hit to scrolling on social media - except I’m mostly learning something new rather than just being entertained. But it also means I spend a lot of time staring at my phone and reading articles on it, which is definitely not a good way to read anything, and it does not feel great either. Besides, you’re one notification away from being pulled out of your reading.

The allure of the phone is strong: everything is at hand and frictionless. If I want to replace it with something else, it has to be similarly easy to use. This rules out using a computer, since I don’t always have one with me and the startup time is considerable even on modern machines. I guess that leaves me with the only option: printing everything on paper and reading that way.

Okay, I’m kidding, but the solution is a bit like paper: it’s an e-ink reader. I currently have a Pocketbook Verse Pro and I love reading on it. The goal would be to have an easy way of taking anything noteworthy (and usually long-form) and transferring it to my e-reader. Most importantly, this is not a Pocketbook-specific solution: in fact it will work on any reader with KOReader installed, meaning it could be your Kobo or Kindle too.

It sounds like a lot of hassle

It does, but let me explain. Once everything is set up, this is actually a very smooth experience. Frictionless.

There are two major sources of friction:

1. Getting the content into the e-reader
2. Removing the content from the e-reader once finished (keeping things tidy)

Conveniently, both problems are solved by Wallabag, which will be familiar if you know Pocket or Instapaper. Wallabag is an open-source “read it later” app, and it is by design self-hosting-friendly, even though you can use it as an online service directly from wallabag.it too. It will serve as the home for all content worthy of proper reading and thus be the backbone of this setup. And because KOReader already integrates with Wallabag, receiving and archiving articles is quite seamless.

The one-tap solution

The end state looks like this: I am going through my RSS feeds on my phone, and if I see something long-form that I’m interested in, I tap on the “Star” button and move on until I have enough articles to read. In a few minutes, I can pick up my e-reader, sync new articles and start reading said articles. During the next sync, the already finished articles will be removed from my device (unless I mark them as not finished).

The one remaining missing piece is a Python script that periodically fetches newly starred (“favourited” in FreshRSS speak) articles from FreshRSS and pushes them to Wallabag. Below you will find both instructions on how to set the whole pipeline up, and the code for the script.

The way the script works is by connecting to FreshRSS to fetch favourited articles, comparing it to a local list of already processed articles, and adding the new ones to your Wallabag instance to be picked up by KOReader. It’s a really simple script that ties this all together. It will also keep producing rotating sync.log files to make any potential troubleshooting easier.

Below is a breakdown of what happens under the hood:

Setting up the pipeline

Pre-requisites

• A server or computer (with Python 3 installed) to run the script periodically.
• FreshRSS 1.27 or newer with Fever API enabled
• Wallabag 2.6.13 or newer
• KOReader on your e-reader

FreshRSS setup

First, you have to enable API access in your FreshRSS instance. Make note of your user’s API password. You can verify if the Fever API is enabled by going to https://foo.bar/p/api/, assuming https://foo.bar/ is the root path to your FreshRSS instance.

Wallabag setup

Next, you have to set up API keys to access your Wallabag instance. Log in to Wallabag and go to API clients management section, where you need to create a new client. I personally created separate clients for my Python script as well as for my KOReader and Wallabagger extension (see below), but you could reuse the same client credentials if you prefer. Note down the Client ID and Client secret.

Sync script setup

The script for syncing articles between FreshRSS and Wallabag can be found in this GitHub repo. Download the .py file and the config.json.example to your server, put them in the same folder, rename the latter to config.json and update its values. You should also chmod 0600 the config.json file or otherwise make sure that it’s safe from prying eyes, since it will store your API credentials.

Tom, you dummy, why not just use a .env file? Everyone knows that’s where secrets go!

Yes, and you’d typically load it using python-dotenv — a module you’d install via pip, which may not even be installed on your machine. Writing my own parser for dotenv files would unnecessarily inflate the length of this script and could lead to unforeseen bugs on different systems. The goal here was to make this as portable as possible, requiring nothing but a Python interpreter, which is almost universally available. This is simply the path of least resistance, and as long as you keep the permissions tight, it is as safe as a .env file.

Okay, now as long as you’ve edited your config correctly, you can try running the script to see if you can connect to both APIs. You should see something like this:

[2025-11-25 23:30:02] INFO: Starting FreshRSS → Wallabag sync
[2025-11-25 23:30:02] INFO: Previously synced: 0 articles
[2025-11-25 23:30:02] INFO: Found 0 starred articles in FreshRSS
[2025-11-25 23:30:02] INFO: No new starred articles to sync. All up to date!

Now it’s time to go to FreshRSS, mark an article as favourite, and re-run the script to see if it gets synced to Wallabag.

Tom, I see you’re storing the previously synced article IDs in a local json file. That’s kind of dumb!

It is! But also it’s beautifully simple and functional. A setup using SQLite would surely be more scalable, but how many articles will you favourite per year? Dozens? Hundreds? This probably gives the script centuries before it starts becoming a problem. Let’s not overengineer things.

Now that your script is up and running, don’t forget to add it to your cron, or a similar solution to periodically run it. I’m using Synology’s Task Scheduler and have set the frequency to 15 minutes.

KOReader setup

Now that articles are getting beamed up to Wallabag, it’s time to set up your e-reader. KOReader supports Wallabag natively, and it’s easy to set it up using the official wiki. I highly recommend saving the empty settings and editing the Lua file on your computer. Typing all the credentials on the e-reader keyboard is no fun.

Once you have Wallabag set up, syncing should download the articles:

I also highly recommend going to Wallabag settings in KOReader, open the section Remote mark-as-read settings and enable the following options:

• Mark finished articles as read
• Mark 100% read articles as read
• Auto-upload article statuses when downloading

This will automatically delete any read articles from your e-reader and mark them as read in Wallabag whenever you sync. You do not have to manually clean anything up - brilliant!

[Bonus] Wallabagger setup

Now that we have a pipeline that feeds our e-reader, we might as well use it in other useful ways. Wallabagger is a Chrome and Firefox extension that saves articles directly to your Wallabag instance. This gives you freedom to shoot any articles you got sent or found in newsletters etc. straight to your e-ink device.

When you install Wallabagger, you have to set it up to connect to your Wallabag instance (hit Check URL) and then provide Wallabag client credentials. You should also tick the option Retrieve content from the browser by default when saving page, otherwise Wallabagger will only save the link itself and some metadata.

Support open-source!

All of this is possible only thanks to open-source developers of the above applications. While you can subscribe to Wallabag’s hosted solution and support them that way, I suspect many of my readers will dabble in self-hosting.

Below are links to the Liberapay accounts where you can support the applications:

• Wallabag
• KOReader
• FreshRSS

What the hell is RSS?

RSS is just a format that defines how websites can publish updates (articles, posts, episodes, and so on) in a standard feed that you can subscribe to using an RSS reader (or aggregator). Don’t worry if this sounds extremely uninteresting to you; there aren’t many people that get excited about format specifications; the beauty of RSS is in its simplicity. Any content management system or blog platform supports RSS out of the box, and often enables it by default. As a result, a large portion of the content on the internet is available to you in feeds that you can tap into. But this time, you’re in full control of what you’re receiving, and the feeds are purely reverse chronological bliss. Coincidentally, you might already be using RSS without even knowing, because the whole podcasting world runs on RSS.

There are many amazing articles about the utility and elegance of RSS, and I do not think the world needs another, so I will spare you and instead focus on my personal experience and tips. If you are interested in a deeper dive, I highly recommend Molly White’s article Curate your own newspaper with RSS. It is a convincing, well-written article that you can also listen to in Molly’s own voice if you wish to.

Broken distribution models

Here’s a little story about the promise of social media. In 2011, my band was getting a little more serious and preparing to record our first album. Facebook was rapidly growing all over the world, so I created an account - mostly to manage my band’s Facebook page. Back then, social media (and Facebook in particular) felt very different: vibrant and full of promise for the brave new future of web 2.0. I looked up all my favorite bands so that every time they put out an album or tour near me, I wouldn’t miss it. Many bands either lacked proper websites or rarely updated them in a useful way, so this felt like the perfect use case for Facebook.

It didn’t take long for me to start seeing the cracks. As Facebook would push for more engagement, some bands would flood their pages with multiple posts per day, especially if they were touring or had a new release coming up. Others would be more restrained, but then their posts would often be lost in the feed. There was no way to opt in only for a certain type of updates from my followed pages, and the increasingly algorithmic feed would simply prioritize posts by engagement. I realized that I wouldn’t be able to get just the important updates; instead, I’d get a wild mish-mash of engagement-bait that I wasn’t willing to work my way through. And don’t get me started about how over time, page owners had to pay to promote their posts to get any reach on the platform - that is simply extortion.

I no longer use Facebook (or any similar social media for that matter) for many reasons, though algorithmic feeds are at the top of the list. Algorithms on social media are very unlikely to be written with your best interest in mind: The goal of social media is to keep you glued to the feed for as long as possible. It optimizes for the most time spent, for engagement, for serving the most ads. It will not necessarily optimize for keeping you well informed, showing you balanced opinions, giving you control or even showing you all the information you’d like. The misalignment of incentives has become very apparent in the last few years, but the problem goes deeper. Any type of curation (because algorithmic feeds are simply curation machines) will never be flexible enough to account for every person’s needs. The story we are sold with algorithmic curation is that it adapts to everyone’s taste and interests, but that’s only true until the interests of the advertisers enter the picture.

How I use RSS

My RSS journey starting many moons ago with Opera and Thunderbird, continued with Google Reader (RIP) and The Old Reader, and finally led me to running my own instance of FreshRSS. However, in the last year, I have read most of the content from my RSS feeds on my phone via the FeedMe app. I find that it scratches the itch of unlocking your phone and wanting to see something novel (probably gravitating towards social media). On the upside, it feeds me only articles and media that a) I have picked upfront and nothing more, b) is typically longer-form and more thoughtful than your typical social media posts.

Also, unlike algorithmic feeds, it allows me to pick what category of my interests I am in the mood for. If I’m in the mood for something lighter, I can just look into my “Fun” folder to check out new stuff from The Oatmeal or xkcd. If I feel like reading something more thoughtful, I’d dive into my “Reads” folder for The Marginalian or Sentiers. Feeling like catching up on the newest AI research? I can browse the latest research papers from arXiv that have specific keywords in the abstracts (such as prompt injection). Or I could just browse everything at once to see what piques my interest. I am the master of what information I consume, how and in what order, and no one can take that away from me by rearranging my feed or tweaking the algorithm.

One of the many small advantages is the consistency of the interface and the lack of distractions when reading. Modern browsers support reader modes, but you need to enter the mode manually and some pages might not be displayed correctly. I don’t have any attention problems (that I know of), but reading articles on certain newspaper sites feels like a cruel joke: the text of the article is often drowned by ads, suggested articles, polls, and other visual smog. Not a pleasant reading experience. Your RSS reader always uses the same font, font size, screen real estate and never shows anything but the article itself.

The focused, reductive nature of RSS readers means you don’t get the full website experience, but that is arguably for the better in a lot of cases. We already mentioned the lack of suggested articles with engagement bait that could easily draw you in, but another notable omission is the comments section. It is very easy to slip into the comments section at the bottom of an article and spend far too much time reading those. You can still do that in an RSS reader by opening the article in your browser, scrolling down to the comments and diving in. At least in my case, that is a safe amount of friction to prevent me from doing it most of the time. Less is more!

Tips to get you going

• Many of the websites you open regularly, follow on social media or get a newsletter from, likely have an RSS feed. Look out for the RSS icon or the words RSS or feed. There are also tools like Lighthouse that can sniff out the feed for you. That said, my experience is that simply adding the homepage URL of the website into an aggregator usually works.
• Remember my frustration with Facebook as a source of news for new music releases? Turns out there is a much better free solution called Muspy, where you enter all your favorite artists and it will notify you of their new releases. And guess what? You either get notified via email, or you use your personal RSS feed. Highly recommended!
• Start easy with something like The Old Reader or Feedly - both offer relatively generous free tiers. And if you outgrow them or want to try something else, you simply export an OPML file with all your feeds and import them into your new RSS solution. This is the upside of open standards: freedom, ownership, and portability.
• Once you have more than 5-10 feeds, start putting them into folders/categories. No need to overthink it, but doing this will help you be more selective about the content you read if you’re in a specific mood.
• RSS readers can be great when traveling or whenever your internet connection might be down or spotty. You can set up your RSS client in a way that automatically fetches new content, so when you board the plane and go dark, you can still read through the already downloaded articles. (Beware, though: not all RSS feeds include full content - sometimes they’re more like teasers.)
• Some websites that limit how many articles you can browse for free are actually less strict about content accessed through RSS feeds. There are obvious ethical concerns with abusing this, but it is still an upside, and you are only consuming what they provide.
• If you want to tinker, you can set up an RSS aggregator like FreshRSS, tiny tiny RSS or selfoss on a shared web hosting service. If you want to go full self-hosted, there are many more options available.
• Get a good mobile app. Try a few before you settle! This is a highly personal choice because even small UI quirks and differences may bother you. If you’re anything like me, you’ll do most of the reading on your phone, so make sure it feels good.
• RSS readers/clients often have bookmarking/starring system which works much like dedicated bookmarking apps.
• Bigger publications often have separate feeds for individual categories or tags - check those to avoid getting your main feed flooded.
• Some websites have very elaborate RSS APIs which allow you to query for specific types of content. For example, arXiv has a really elaborate one, allowing you to only follow specific topics. The documentation is quite complex, so here is a quick example to kick start you:
  • https://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=abs:LLM+AND+multilingual&sortBy=submittedDate&sortOrder=descending
  • The query searches through the most recently submitted papers with the words LLM and multilingual in the abstract.
• Do a little cleanup from time to time: unsubscribe from feeds that no longer seem to interest you. It’s fine, no one will take offense, and your attention is too precious to be wasted on stuff that is not for you.
• Don’t know where to start? Check out this list of 100 most popular RSS feeds, Feedspot’s 70 most popular feeds or Hostinger’s list of 55 popular blogs. Apart from that, Google is your friend (especially if you start searching for specific topics or niches), and good blogs often link to other blogs - all you need to do is to follow the breadcrumbs.

Happy RSS-ing!

EDIT: Hello, Hacker News! Thrilled to be on the front page.
EDIT 2: Check out my follow-up article on how to discover new RSS feeds.