Curate Your Own Newsfeed with Newsflash

Newsflash gives RSS fans an easy way to discover feeds, organize them by category, and keep every device in sync.

The FOSS Force Linux App of the Week — Newsflash

Remember RSS?

I remember it fondly. With RSS, I was able to stay in the loop on just about any topic or website. When a site updated with something new, my RSS reader would alert me. It was not only easy to use, but it also allowed me to curate my own list of the news that I wanted to read.

I could cobble together a collection of RSS feeds on subjects like art, music, movies, TV, sports, and technology, knowing that I wouldn’t have to worry about the subjects I didn’t care about.

But then RSS seemed to fall out of favor, with many popular sites forgoing those feeds.

They didn’t go away, however. FOSS Force still uses the RSS feeds of tech news sites as the backbone of its News Wire feature, which is itself available as a one-stop shopping RSS feed.

There are also still plenty of apps that make curating your own news feeds easy, and one of them is an open source GPLv3 app called Newsflash, which can be a great complement to your existing web-based RSS reader account. It offers syncing across all of your devices, desktop notifications, fast searches, filtering, tagging, keyboard shortcuts, and indefinite article retention.

As Prego used to say, it’s in there… and more.

Newsflash makes it easy to discover feeds, add feeds manually, search for feeds via topic, categorize your topics, customize feed sync, and the list goes on. It’s also really easy to use and is available on any Linux distribution that supports Flatpak or Snap. The app is in active development, so it’s not fallen by the wayside like some other RSS apps.

Installing Newsflash

Thanks to Flatpak and Snap, Newsflash is very easy to install on most systems, although you’ll want to check to make sure which of the two (maybe both?) are enabled on your distro. We recommend Flatpaks, and have a handy article available on FOSS Force that you can use to make sure your system is set up to support them before attempting to install.

With that taken care of, installation on Flatpak is completed with the following command:

flatpak install flathub io.gitlab.news_flash.NewsFlash

If Snap is your universal app package manager of choice, the command for installing Newsflash is:

sudo snap install newsflash

Once Newsflash is installed, if you don’t see it listed in your desktop menu, log out and log back in, and it should appear.

Newsflash: First Run

When you run Newsflash for the first time, you’ll be presented with the Discover pop-up. From this pop-up, you can scroll through the available categories, or type the name of a site or topic, and add what you’re looking for.

Before you do add a site, I would suggest adding categories. If you don’t do this at first, fret not, you can always do it later and then go back into a feed and assign a category.

To add a category, click the + drop-down near the top left of the window and select Category from the list.

With your categories added, you can go back to feed discovery, search for what you want, select the feed to be added, and then assign the feed a category.

Adding feeds manually

Another important feature is the ability to add feeds manually. If you go the Discover Feeds route, and don’t find the feed you’re looking for, you can always create a feed manually, using the RSS address for the site in question.

To do this, click + and then select Feeds. In the resulting pop-up, type or paste the URL for the RSS feed in question.

One thing to keep in mind is that RSS isn’t nearly as popular as it once was. Because of that, some sites have pretty much given up on RSS feeds. Almost all sites have a feed, but they no longer necessarily make them easy to find. This is mostly due to social media being widely used for this purpose. However, I much prefer using RSS because I don’t have to worry about seeing toxic replies or other ugliness that I’d rather not have to deal with.

The good news is that the feed discovery tool is really good at finding the feeds you want. For example, I wanted to follow a particular person from a news organization, but the site no longer included the RSS feed icon. I went to the feed discovery tool, typed the name of the person, and (lo and behold) that person’s feed was available to follow.

Some sites do still push their RSS feeds, and link to them with a small yellow or black icon. If you find one, click it, and then copy the URL for the feed.

Another feature that I really appreciate is the ability to view the full content from within the app, so you don’t have to open a web browser to read a piece of news. This doesn’t happen automatically; instead, you have to click the book icon near the top right and Newsflash will attempt to display the entire piece.

As a news junkie who has reached critical mass, having the ability to follow only the reporters or sites that I want makes it not only easier to keep abreast of what’s going on, but also to keep me from seeing the things I don’t want.

Yes, RSS feeds might seem like a thing from the past, but I still find them incredibly useful, and Newsflash is one of the better apps I’ve found.