I use webfeeds to fetch news and follow niche blogs. Most websites that are worthy of your attention provide webfeeds, and you can easily add them to your feed reader.
Feed readers allow you to merge all of your content sources into a single coherent timeline. By the way, that’s exactly what Vesti does. In many cases, having a simple standalone feed reader app isn’t enough because some people use multiple devices and want to keep them in sync.
Let’s say I’ve already read some news in an Android app and now want to finish reading today’s news on my laptop. My Android app should let my laptop know which articles I’ve already read so that they aren’t shown as unread. These problems can be solved by setting up your own webfeed server and connecting all your apps to this common source of truth.
Initially, my app supported only one kind of server: Nextcloud News. It works reasonably well, but it’s pretty slow and hard to set up. I recently learned about a server called Miniflux, and it turned out to be the best feed server I’ve ever seen. It’s ridiculously simple to set up and blazing fast, so I decided to support Miniflux in the next Vesti release.