CommaFeed

CommaFeed is one of the most polished open-source self-hosted RSS readers, with over 3,500 GitHub stars and a maintainer who has been steadily shipping releases for more than a decade. Originally created in 2013 as a direct response to Google Reader's shutdown, the project has remained focused on the core experience that made Google Reader successful: a fast three-pane layout, keyboard-driven navigation, and a feed-aggregation engine that keeps subscriptions fresh without forcing users to babysit it.

Common Use Cases

News-driven professionals self-host CommaFeed as a private feed reader to follow industry blogs, RSS-enabled newsletters, and news sites without algorithmic filtering or ad-tracking. Researchers and journalists subscribe to academic feeds, government publications, and topic-focused aggregators, taking advantage of CommaFeed's tagging and starring to organize sources by project. Open-source maintainers track GitHub release feeds for their dependencies and competitor projects, leveraging push notifications for high-priority updates so they never miss a security patch. Privacy-conscious readers replace SaaS feed readers like Feedly or NewsBlur to stop sending click data to third parties, while keeping the same daily reading workflow — same keyboard shortcuts, same three-pane layout, same OPML support. Hobbyists, RSS power users, and homelab enthusiasts use CommaFeed alongside their other self-hosted apps as a low-resource component that runs on the smallest VPS plans.

Key Features

• Three-pane Google-Reader layout with feeds, entry list, and reading view
• Full keyboard shortcuts (j/k/v/m/s/r) for power-user navigation
• OPML import and export for portability between feed readers
• Native Android and iOS companion apps connecting via the REST API
• Embedded H2 database with no separate database server required
• Adaptive background feed refresh scheduler with no external workers
• Tagging, starring, and mark-as-favorite for organizing reading workflow
• Full-text search across feed archive
• Push notification support for high-priority feeds
• Multi-user support with optional registration controls
• Comprehensive REST API and OpenAPI documentation

Mobile and Integrations

CommaFeed has companion native apps for Android and iOS that connect to a self-hosted instance over the REST API, supporting offline reading with sync, full keyboard navigation on tablets with external keyboards, and the same feed organization that the web reader provides. The REST API is documented via OpenAPI and is used by community-built integrations including Tiny Tiny RSS bridges, Fever-compatible adapters for older feed clients, and IFTTT-style automation tools. Coaches, researchers, and analysts often layer their own reporting on top of the API to track which sources are publishing what topics. CommaFeed also speaks the Fever API protocol, which lets older RSS clients (Reeder, Mr. Reader) connect without requiring a CommaFeed-specific app.

Why deploy CommaFeed on Hostinger VPS

Deploying CommaFeed on a Hostinger VPS gives you a private, always-on RSS reader under your own domain with no per-account fees, no third-party tracking of which articles you read, and no SaaS lock-in. The lightweight Java binary backed by H2 keeps resource usage minimal even with thousands of subscriptions, so CommaFeed runs comfortably alongside other apps on the smallest VPS plans. Persistent volume storage protects your subscriptions, read state, and tags across container updates and rebuilds, while full root access lets you wire up SMTP for password reset emails, integrate with backup pipelines that pick up the H2 database file, and tune the JVM for the size of your reading list. Self-hosting also keeps reading habits private — there is no third party logging which feeds you opened, when, or how often.