Agree here too. FreshRSS is an RSS aggregator, basically a self-hosted GReader, which means it fetches the item contents and syncs the read status across clients. That is the HUGE advantage of using it instead of just adding the feeds directly to your client in your device.
Other FreshRSS features I love are the option to load full content of item that only share excerpts, and the option to use CSS selectors to remove content you don’t want (like embedded ads).
I’ve been running FreshRSS for several years now without any problems, but mine is running on a dedicated home server running other services too.
Your experience will depend on your RSS client. As others already mentioned, you will want to configure your client to only pull manually (usually on open only), otherwise it will keep throwing errors at you.
I am going to second the recommendation to get your hands on a cheap Raspberry Pi (you can easily run it on a Zero 2 W) with an 8GB microSD. You can then get a cheap US$2/year domain and use Cloudflare Tunnel to access it from anywhere without having to open ports or expose your whole network to the internet.
The full setup should be around $50 including the Pi, case, microSD, cable, power adapter, and cheap domain in NameCheap or similar.
As far as I can tell PieFed already handles deleting old content (1 week by default, but I’m looking at the code on my phone so not the best way of doing research). I’ll do some more code reading later if I have a chance.
YuNoHost is a great alternative, but if you really want to learn, I would instead recommend really spending some time learning Docker; you don’t have to understand how to build your own images (although that is also very useful), but mostly what is going on at a high level, and then switch to Docker Compose. These days it is extremely easy to run very complex architectures with a single compose file.
You also don’t need to make it public for your tests, you can always start with local ip addresses and you own computer, or if you have a small computer that can run headless, then you can setup your experiments in there.
Oh, I am running a bunch of things already, so adding one more to the stack is not a real problem for me. The only service I would think at least 100 times before even trying is email; yes, it is tempting to do it, but just thinking at all the ways that could go wrong gives me nightmares.
I don’t really worry too much about running multiple DBs; all the apps I am currently running are dockerized. As far as I can run everything I need for an app can run as a container, I am good. For apps like these, they run in their own network and only the main entry point is visible to the interwebs via private tunnel.
Ah, good catch. This is something I have to look into. Other self-hosted apps I have usually keep a local cache for a few days only and fetch on demand when needed. Need to explore if both Lemmy and PieFed to something similar.
I am running them on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM and a 2TB NVMe SSD. Loving it.
Even better: Caddy.
As simple and easy to run as nginx, and has built-in cert management.
And now running both Lemmy and PieFed side by side (OP, posting from my PieFed account).
I think admin wise I am going to stick with PieFed. Definitely liking it more!
This is not strictly a self hosting answer, but given the problem you are describing, I think it is still relevant.
If you are already comfortable using an LLM based tool to manage email, take a look at SaneBox (this is not an LLM).
It is not an email provider and not an email client. It sits behind the scenes and works with almost any provider that supports IMAP, including custom domains. All the filtering, prioritization, and notification cleanup happens server side, so you keep your existing setup.
It excels specifically at what you are struggling with: automatically separating real human email from receipts, shipping notices, one time codes, and low value notifications, without forcing you into Inbox Zero workflows or Gmail specific features.