So this past week, I FINALLY started to look into RSS feeds. I had been hearing about them more and more recently and I knew they have been around for a while and wanted to see what they are all about.
I wanted to make a post, simply to document my findings during my little "POC" of RSS feeds and Nitter. I will now be making this more production ready and creating a how-to for it.
In short: I am using RSS now for most of my consumption of News and Tweets.
RSS
RSS is amazing. In absolute basic terms, it is a way to ingest media (News, Social Media, Blogs, ect) into a single place. RSS feeds are typically XML formatted lists of content. As new content is added, the feed is updated. Now RSS alone does not do this, this task is the job of the RSS reader. In this case, I am using FreshRSS, which has been amazing.
In FreshRSS, I have feeds from my favorite News stations (lets not get on that topic, but I do tend to ingest media from multiple sources in order to stay informed, RSS makes this SO much easier). This allows me to get media all in the same place and make my choice as to what to read. Nothing is hidden, nothing is targeted or tracked. It is just the news.
For those of you who already have RSS readers, this is the RSS feed for my Blog :) https://blog.mudhut.xyz/rss/
Nitter
GitHub: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
With the help of Nitter, FreshRSS gets a pretty robust way to ingest social media content, without the adds, tracking, or targeting. Nitter makes this possible, by allowing you to aggregate multiple Twitter feeds into a single RSS feed. For example, you can have a feed for all the YouTube channels you follow. Or a feed for all of your friends. Or a feed for News on Twitter. The possibilities are endless.
Nitter is Free and Open Source, they also have a "public" version hosted here: https://nitter.net/about which works the exact same. It is worth mentioning that you do not need to host Nitter yourself, but it is an option. They have a Docker container pre-built and ready to go.
I am hosting this in MicroK8s, using a custom Helm Chart based on the K8s-at-home "common" chart, and with the help of SearXNG's Helm Chart (for Redis). I have the Helm Chart in my GitLab and will post it publicly soon.
For the Docker image, I am using the publicly available image they build for Nitter. In the future, I hope to build this for myself internally. More coming on GitLab in the future. Their CI/CD tooling is PERFECT for the homelab users, and it's free!
FreshRSS
GitHub: https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS
As mentioned above, FreshRSS is the software I am using to aggregate all of my RSS feeds into a single user-interface. It is Free and Open Source software that you can host yourself. I am using the K8s-at-home Helm chart to deploy to MicroK8s.
This works great, however they just announced the depreciation of that repo, so sad. I have started moving all of my helm charts to an Internal GitLab server, where I plan to use CI/CD to build and deploy these applications from source. This will allow me to be in control of the base images myself and stop depending on others to do it. I will post my configs to GitHub once I iron out any bugs.
So what's next?
I will be making a How-to on this very soon. I need to get my MicroK8s Post done first, so that you can follow from Infrastructure Creation to Application Deployment. So keep your eye out for this in the future!
What is coming next:
- Tutorial on MicroK8s deployment
- Tutorial for Nitter and FreshRSS deployment to MicroK8s
- Tutorial for GitLab in MicroK8s
- Tutorial on GitLab CI/CD for building internal Helm Charts and Docker images, right in Kubernetes.
That is a lot of stuff, but my hope is to make write ups on all of these items.