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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   2171 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 17, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I suppose the downside to self-hosting is that the computer would need to be on 24/7, or?

Yeah, but almost nobody self-hosts on their PC. You either rent a server/virtual machine somewhere for cheap, or you put something like a RaspberryPi on your network. That uses less electricity, and you can mess with your PC without taking your private cloud offline.

If don't have a server somewhere already anyway, or if you're not extremely privacy conscious, or if you're not actively looking for a beginner's hacking project, don't bother with self-hosting.

OK. I don't think I'll be following anything very sensitive on my feeds.

I don't get how miniflux works. I downloaded https://github.com/miniflux/v2/releases/download/2.2.3/miniflux-windows-amd64.exe

but it doesn't do anything. Flashes a dos window.

Maybe I'm too normie for this shit.

Honestly, then just use feedly.com or feeder.co

Both have decent Android/iOS apps. If you want to mess around with it only for a few minutes to begin with, Outlook also still has a built-in RSS reader. It's really easy to use. Rightclick the "RSS-Feeds" folder, select "Add Feed" and paste something like "https://www.astralcodexten.com/feed/". Done. (All Substack blogs provide their RSS feed just by adding /feed/ to the end of the address.)

RSS doesn't need to be this open source nerd fest, that just happens to be the guys who still use it most consistently. The reason for that is a bit historic. RSS used to be hugely popular 15 years ago. Everybody in tech was using it, every day. But it's by definition a decentralized technology - and Google, Meta and Amazon really have no use for something like that. So they worked hard at replacing it.

The installation instructions:

Installing Miniflux is straightforward if you have some basic system administration knowledge.

There actually aren't any instructions for installing on Windows.

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