Quitting the Doomscroll: Setting Up FreshRSS Instead of Twitter for News

Okay so I finally did the thing Ive been threatening to do since like 2023 and ripped my morning news habit off of Twitter/X entirely. Not for any grand ideological reason, though I do have opinions about that place that Ill spare you. Mostly it was because I noticed I was spending 40 minutes "checking for tech news" and getting maybe four actual pieces of information out of it, buried under reply-guy arguments and ads for supplement gummies. So I set up FreshRSS on my little home server and Im not going back.

If youve never run an RSS reader, the pitch is simple: you pick the sites you actually trust, the reader pulls their headlines and posts on a schedule, and you read them in chronological order with zero algorithm deciding whats "engaging" enough to show you. No ranking, no ads, no guy quote-tweeting a screenshot of another guy being wrong. Just the actual posts, in order.

What I actually did

I already run a handful of self-hosted things on an old Dell Optiplex I picked up for about $60 a couple years back (its got 16GB of RAM and a decent enough SSD, way overkill for this), so adding FreshRSS was just another docker-compose service. If you dont already have a box like that, honestly a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 handles this fine too, FreshRSS is not demanding software.

The docker-compose setup is maybe 20 lines:

services:
  freshrss:
    image: freshrss/freshrss:latest
    ports:
      - "8080:80"
    volumes:
      - ./data:/var/www/FreshRSS/data
      - ./extensions:/var/www/FreshRSS/extensions
    environment:
      - TZ=America/New_York
    restart: unless-stopped

Run docker compose up -d, go to localhost:8080, walk through the little install wizard (pick SQLite unless you have a reason not to, its plenty for personal use), set a username and password, and youre in. Took me about ten minutes total, most of which was me trying to remember my own server's local IP address because I never write it down anywhere sensible.

From there its just adding feeds. Most sites still publish an RSS or Atom feed even if they dont advertise it, usually at /feed or /rss or /atom.xml. I threw in a bunch of the usual suspects, a couple of hardware review sites, a Linux kernel mailing list digest (mostly so I can feel smart when I skim it and understand maybe 30% of it), and a handful of personal blogs I like that dont post often enough to justify checking manually.

The part that actually made the difference

Here's the thing that made this stick for me instead of being one of those self-hosting projects I set up once and abandon: I put the FreshRSS tab as my browser's new-tab page. So every time I open a new tab out of habit, instead of typing "tw" and hitting enter on autopilot, I get my actual reading queue. Sounds dumb, works incredibly well. Habits are just cued behavior and I hijacked the cue.

I also turned off "mark as read on scroll" in the settings, because I found myself scroll-skimming just like I used to on the timeline, which defeats the whole point. Now I have to actually click into something or explicitly mark it read, which slows me down just enough to actually register what Im reading instead of pattern-matching my way past it.

Is it as fun as the platform I ditched? No, not really, and Ill be honest that I miss a little bit of the chaos sometimes, the random funny post from someone I dont follow that a friend quote-tweets into my feed. RSS cant do serendipity like that. But I was getting one good laugh for every twenty minutes of genuinely bad-for-my-brain scrolling, and that math stopped working for me a while ago.

If youve got a spare Pi gathering dust or a NAS thats mostly idle, this is maybe a two-hour project including the time you'll spend finding feed URLs for your favorite sites. FreshRSS also has a decent mobile-friendly web view so you dont even need an app, though there are a bunch of RSS reader apps that speak the Fever or Google Reader API if you want something native. Im using it in-browser for now and it's fine.

Anyway. Fourteen and a half years of writing this blog and Im still discovering that the boring, unglamorous self-hosted tool is usually the one that sticks around longest.