I've been trying to find a good one, but many of the features I want are not written down somewhere.
In roughly decreasing order of priority, I'd like something:
* That doesn't automatically delete the items in your feed, either because you have too many or because it's been too long. Alternately, it could be set ridiculously high (by quick estimates, if it can handle 1 million items, that's enough to deal with 250 new items, every single day, for 10 years, so I'd say that would be high enough, and quite frankly, if I run up against that limit, I can probably delete some).
* Free, but that seems fairly incompatible with the first thing. Self-hosted, possibly?
* That has some relatively easy way of bypassing paywalls.
* That allows for manual tags (not just folders, because things can generally only go in one folder) of either feeds or articles.
* That seems relatively stable (not as big of an issue since it's fairly easy to migrate, but it would still be nice).
Do you have any suggestions?
Though it may not meet your criteria around infinite retention. The developer has written about their philosophy on that here: https://inessential.com/2018/10/13/netnewswire_article_age_l...
Some excerpts from the FAQ:
How long do you keep articles unread? Unread articles are kept forever. Although there is a limit of 500 total (both read and unread) articles per feed. How often feeds are updated? Refresh rate depends on the time of the last article in feed: few hours ago—each 15–45 minutes, less than a week—each 1–2 hours, less than a month—each 2–3 hours and 3+ hours for others. Feeds that support WebSub are updated in realtime. Do you support password protected feeds? Yes, feeds with HTTP basic access authentication are supported. How many feeds I can subscribe to? You can subscribe or import up to 3000 feeds.
https://github.com/skx/rss2email/
You can self-host easily, and you get all your feed items by email where you can filter, archive, and search them easily. Having the items end up in your email is easier than having to share state in a database and cope with different laptop vs. phone vs. desktop views, etc.
I guess the only thing it doesn't have that a SaaS offering could do would be some sort of recommendation engine (which I have no interest in).
From a desktop app's point of view, I have tried liferea for a while and liked it a lot.
I'm not using anymore though, because the websites I used to follow went behind captcha mechanism(s) and cannot fetch their feed any longer which saddens me just by thinking about it.
Probably not really usable for anyone except myself but here is the code for my reader: https://github.com/vborovikov/news
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedly