I don't normally do this, and I know I should to it more, but I want to call out my favourite software project.

Commafeed

It's a #selfhosted #RSS news aggregator that was inspired by Google Reader.

When Google Reader closed down, I moved to feedly, but was never really satisfied with it. After a year or two, I looked at the Awesome-Selfhosted list of options -- I was establishing my own "data centre" at home for self-hosted services at the time -- and I considered the options. The one that stood out to me was #CommaFeed for a number of reasons:

• It had a clean interface
• it was simple to deploy (it comes with the option of an embedded DB, so I didn't need to maintain a separate database engine)
• it came with an extension for the mobile 'phone app I was using for feedly (the name of which escapes me)

I downloaded and installed it, and set it up for me to access from whereever, and I have never looked back. Very shortly after starting to use it, I realised that the mobile app extension was unnecessary, as the UI was very good on mobile as well as on the desktop.

I have been using commafeed since about 2016/2017, without any problem (except for that one occasion where I messed up the database all by myself! but I was able to recover from it, and I learned an important lesson).

You can use it at commafeed.com/ without having to download or install it. If, however, you're interested in starting to host your own service, and if, like me, you believe news needs to come to you via a more stable channel than "social media", then commafeed might be a great way to dip your toe into this wonderful world.

Thanks to Jérémie Panzer (Athou) for the great work he's doing with #commafeed.