Reclaiming the web with a personal reader

The gold standard easy way of doing this is tailscale. I have a few apps hosted on a Raspberry Pi at home (like home assistant). I have tailscale on that Pi, and on my phone and it works very well. The only auth you have to do is "log into tailscale on each machine".

I really cannot recommend tailscale enough for how easy it is to set up a secure network of your own devices.

I have wireguard and caddy set up with docker on my server:

    version: "3.7"

    x-common-variables: &common-variables
    PGID: 1000
    PUID: 1000
    TZ: America/New_York

    services:
    caddy:
        container_name: caddy
        image: caddy:2.6.4
        restart: unless-stopped
        environment:
        <<: *common-variables
        HOST: "redacted"
        LOCAL_IP: 192.168.1.2
        ports:
        - "80:80"
        - "443:443"
        - "443:443/udp"
        volumes:
        - ./appdata/caddy/Caddyfile:/etc/caddy/Caddyfile
        - ./appdata/caddy/site:/srv
        - ./appdata/caddy/data:/data
        - ./appdata/caddy/config:/config
    wireguard:
        image: lscr.io/linuxserver/wireguard:latest
        container_name: wireguard
        cap_add:
        - NET_ADMIN
        - SYS_MODULE #optional
        environment:
        <<: *common-variables
        PEERS: myPhone,myLaptop
        ALLOWEDIPS: 0.0.0.0/0,::/0
        volumes:
        - ./appdata/wireguard:/config
        - /lib/modules:/lib/modules #optional
        ports:
        - 51820:51820/udp
        sysctls:
        - net.ipv4.conf.all.src_valid_mark=1
        restart: unless-stopped

    (config) {
        @internal {
            remote_ip 192.168.1.0/24
        }
        handle @internal {
            reverse_proxy {args.0}
        }
        respond 404
    }


    mySecretService.{$HOST} {
        import config "{$LOCAL_IP}:5678"
    }

- You may want a VLAN or separate guest network depending on if you allow guests on your network, what type of services you're running, etc.

- Many of the things I run at home have password authentication and I use them in addition to the VPN restriction.

- This was the first thing I thought of and may be insecure for reasons outside of my expertise.

- The nice thing about this is that I run pihole in the same compose file so when my phone is on my VPN I get remote ad-blocking "for free".

- Tailscale is easier and nicer (UI-wise) to set up, but I stopped using it because it's a battery hog on iOS. The "trusting someone else's server" thing is also an issue, but if not for the battery issue, I would probably still be trading the added risk for the convenience. This was not too bad to set up, though, and I'm happy with it for my simple needs. The Tailscale app also doesn't have a convenience feature that the Wireguard app does: I can tell Wireguard specific networks that I don't want it to run on (i.e. when I'm home) so that it enables automatically when I leave and turns off when I'm home.

It'd definitely be possible although, if you're not already using a VPN, I doubt it'd be easier. You could do it a few ways, but the gist would be running the VPN endpoint and the web app in the "same place" (same machine, same network, etc.) and restrict access to the web app from anywhere else.

I have been quite happy with Basic HTTP authentication for most uses. It's still almost universally supported, thankfully.

For "securing" my application which hosts text snippets I've clipped from other websites and nothing else, it is sufficient.

It's easily lost that development best practices are a function of scale.

What's absolutely necessary to get anything done in a large mature project with many developers and a sprawling code base may be cumbersome in a small single-developer project.

For personal projects I start writing tests when I run into something that is difficult to get right. Not before. I then focus on adding tests ad hoc when I run into problems.

I generally agree, though it depends on the nature of the application.

A couple years ago, I was working on a personal project where I'd built a respiratory gas analyzer and needed to write some software that could interface with it over Bluetooth and display the data in real time. Unit testing for various functions that needed to accurately perform scientific calculations was very beneficial, but in retrospect, writing tests for other aspects of the interface was pretty much a waste of time. I ended up getting rid of the tests entirely once I had confidence my functions wouldn't be changing by that point. It turns out that when you're a solo developer, manually testing your application can be perfectly adequate.

I’ve been working on some side projects for this sort of thing. Would you be interested in trying out a beta of this? I really like the idea of adding some summarization with gpt and if others are interested maybe I’ll wrap it up and share it?

Now it’s just a simple JavaScript app I use locally but maybe I should make it cooler… this idea sounds cooler than what I was thinking

This matches some vision of the early Internet and agents (having programs browsing the internet for you to do useful tasks). I thought it was Douglas Engelbart but I cannot find anything about agents. Maybe it was some other technology expert.

I'm exactly the opposite. Having an RSS reader means that I quickly process all the "new" stuff, and then proceed to hack for a while. Before setting this up, I'd find myself aimlessly clicking about, thinking I might find something new here on HN, maybe there on Reuters, or even over yonder on ... etc. etc.

my experience matches https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38642092

Who needs another inbox to manage?

I use rss2email to send all my rss subscription entries as emails. So I have one centralized location for everything (personal emails, mailing list messages, rss feeds). Combined with filtering to individual spools and a powerful email client (mutt), it is a very pleasant unified experience.

I’m 100% in agreement, the state of IT makes me mad.

We had something close to good for a brief window before marketing and greed took over the internet.

I think if someone bully a synology nas-like product with apps designed to benefit the end user and people (“your IT person”) to support you which wasn’t aimed at fleecing all personal data and dollars out of customers it may very well work and would be utopia for the end user but the economics probably makes it a low margin business with lots of risks (e.g. liability over losing peoples files)

sometimes i fantasize about the concept of "your IT person", kind of your local barber, general practitioner, tailor or baker. that is on charge of some aspect of your digital life with their own local little infra, tailoring personalized feeds and takes care of privacy/health issues, and provides you with their own simple interfaces or "speak" open protocols that connects with your feed reader, from movies, written articles to memes and funny videos.

Wow, I haven't thought about this idea before. I really resonate with this and can see it being an actual reality in the next 5-10 years. That being said, I'm sure somebody has tried the approach. What's preventing it from happening now?

The idea is lovely and really appealing — I think the main reason it hasn’t gone that way is because this technology is inherently about leverage and scale. Write code once, run it a million times for little marginal cost. All structural forces seem to be working against this. Maybe when we’re all out of a job replaced by AI it will be more feasible??

I can really commiserate with how you are feeling. Something I’ve done recently is set up a “homelab” server and running a few web apps on it of various functions. Nothing novel here, but what I really love about this is how all of these apps are user centric and open source/community built. There’s no user hostile algorithms here or even ad based systems. Only software that tends to put the user first and tends to speak open protocols.

This sort of thing is very achievable if you work in IT and can run your own server. But what about everyone else?

Your idea of a personal “IT person”, like your own personal barber or tailor, is very intriguing. I wonder if its feasible to provide a service like this to people who are of a similar mindset about disconnecting from huge tech companies/algorithms and using something more personal, but don’t have the technical means to achieve this?

I’ve also been thinking about the personal data aspect of healthcare. I hate that my medical records are stored in MyChart and a dozen other proprietary systems that I have no control over. Yet, I have a super computer in my pocket. Why can’t I maintain my own copy of my records and selectively share data with my doctors when I arrive for an appointment? Why do I still need to have one doctor’s office fax something to another’s? I should be able to own my data and tap a button on my phone to do this. Only Apple’s Health app seems to come anywhere close to providing a fraction of this functionality, but there seems to be 0 adoption of this within the US. Even then, this only benefits Apple users. Something like health data should not be locked in a propriety system, even one that runs locally like Apple Health. There should be some open protocol and an ecosystem of implementations.

I agree. I bought the book twice. Bought a paper copy, read it and gave it to a family member. Recently I bought it again on Libro.fm as an audio book.

Indeed, although I would add to clarify that it's not about "digital detoxing" or something for increased productivity, but rather more philosophical, more of a discourse.

In that vein, I'd also recommend another of hers, "Saving Time," which is (quietly?) incredibly radical. Personally, I found it the better of the two, with more of a focused narrative.

fwiw my reasoning wasn't javascript -> node, it was more that I was biased towards doing all significant work on the backend. So it didn't even occur to me that I could add some ad hoc logic to fetch the article HTML from js, pass it to readability and insert the in the UI, which I guess is what you suggest.

Having this logic available in the backend was convenient for me, anyway. I'm using it also for the "send to kindle" feature, which I couldn't have if content cleaning was done browser side. Having it in the backend also opens the option to save the content in the db to skip loading/parsing latency and preserving it long term.

In other ways, I’m upset and jealous the author got there first.

Don't be! the whole point of this was to build something for myself, and use the process to reflect. There's no reason why trying something similar shouldn't work for you, I certainly wasn't the first to implement a personal reader.

Fun fact: I just skimmed through one of the indie web posts I linked (which I had read months ago) and it struck me how much of their ideas I just replicated almost verbatim in my post:

Firstly, don't try and make your software work for everyone, or just for a specific set of people you think may be interested. Make it for you.

By making it generic and possible for others to work with it, you'll make tradeoffs that may make things worse for your own usage, or may even design for an imaginary user that may not even exist, or build a system that with 17 different configuration items you could have a completely different system. Be selfish and make it more useful for yourself.

In other ways, I’m upset and jealous the author got there first.

If it makes you feel better (or worse?) I wrote something very similar to this 20 years ago and still use it every day. I wanted my own RSS reader back then, hated all the ones I saw and wanted one that looked like a normal blog (not inbox, similar to OP's requirements) that I could design however I wanted. So I basically wrote an RSS feed parser to give me everything and designed it to look like my normal blog does.

That got modified to going to grab the full article if the RSS feed only had blurbs. I didn't want to have to click outside my reader to view the full post, I wanted everything in my feed reader. Since I had a basic page scraper, I used that for other sites that didn't have RSS feeds, this helped a lot when social media became popular so I never had to actually go to any social media sites at all. I could just stay in my own feed with the content I wanted (I was never really into social media anyway).

And as you can imagine, it being 20 years old means it's written in old tech, PHP and XSLT, because that's what I was writing 20 years ago. And it's still written in that.

In any case I highly suggest making your own. It's a fun project. Sure mine is crufty and old and sometimes doesn't generate the right content I want (scraping is fairly imperfect), but it's mine and it's been my daily reader for 20 years and I love it.

Those HR bastards manipulating the customers into buying adtech when everyone knows the real profit^H benefit to humanity would be if I made an indie game in straight C

Oh that'd be cool. It could provide consolidated summaries of all of your sources as well ("here's what was shared today"). I would use that for sure.

Here you go, an RSS GPT for ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-QibjxlGmU-feed-buddy

I love it! I'm doing something similar: using playwright as a headless browser to log into twitter a couple times a day and pull news & updates for me from saved searches. It's just for me: gives me a digest of twitter updates about the topics I care about without having to endure the site, toxic debates, and annoying ads.

Heh, I wrote [1] specifically for the "apartment listings" use case, but instead of notifying you by email, it uses GitHub Actions to create an RSS feed from a couple of CSS selectors.

[1] Feed me up, Scotty! https://feed-me-up-scotty.vincenttunru.com/

I like your idea about uplifting ads a lot!

I miss the various *planet feeds. I've started but then stopped building copies over the years. Whenever I get interested I don't have time to do the work and whenever I have the time I don't have the interest.

Some parts sounded like you were talking about me! :-)

Its funny, how many technologists play with stuff on the side, derive learnings from these experiences and end up bring something helpful, even valuable to their professional jobs...but employers sometimes - at least in some of my cases - disparages such efforts, or often block such enthusiasm. Then again, maybe i'm just working for the wrong kinds of orgs. ;-)

I'm glad that you have been able to reap the benefits of the knock-on effect; kudos to you!