Hello there!
I’ve been using RSS for years. Initially, it was Google RSS Reader and a couple of subscriptions. Just a couple of new posts per day. I was able to manage them manually, read interesting ones, and skip everything else. The number of subscriptions started to grow, so I needed a way to go through all posts, filter them, and save them for later reading.
Pocket was the solution I had been using for a long time. It was a nice service to save articles to read them later. If you don’t have an internet connection, open a saved version. The saved version wasn’t perfect; sometimes Pocket wasn’t able to generate it at all, sometimes some paragraphs were missing, or formatting was wrong. So I preferred the online version, anyway, the internet connection is available 99% of the time. But overall, the service was good.
I don’t remember the reason why, but I decided to delete the Pocket account. As a temporary solution, I saved all existing links to a browser’s reading list. I started to explore self-hosted solutions and later migrated to Karakeep. It has a lot of cool features, but I’ve been using it the same way as Pocket. Open a RSS reader, save a link, add some tags, and read it later. Pretty simple. Yeah, I know it has an integration with search intexer or AI for auto-tagging and some other fancy stuff. I don’t need them, after years of using Pocket, I learned a single lesson - I never search in read posts, and I don’t use Pocket as a personal knowledge base.
Recently, I discovered a feature that can simplify the “Open a RSS reader, save a link, add some tags, read it later” flow. It completely changed how I use Karakeep. It is hidden in User Settings and called RSS Subscriptions and allows for automatically fetch new posts from blogs, parse tags, and save them into Karakeep. It combined two services into one.
Automation is great, but only when the signal-to-noise ratio is under control. This feature might be a problem if you have a lot of subscriptions or active blogs. In this case, it would save a lot of unnecessary posts. It is not a problem for me because I deleted a lot of “spammy” subscriptions and left only the necessary ones. So, Karakeep would save 1-2 posts per day on average.
This setup works well if you read a few high-quality blogs regularly and don’t need a long-term knowledge archive.