Some jerk company (like Google) cannot suddenly discontinue my entire reader with all my feeds, because its mine, on my server. But because it's a web app, I can use it from any device, unlike a local app. After Google killed reader, That was just too annoying. Self hosted since.

A self-hostes RSS reader? Probably the ability to read your stuff from anywhere without installing something. Like on your work PC... ;)

For me, it makes the clients disposable. I can reinstall the laptop, desktop, phone and be up and running in no time, without doing backups and preparation. Also it is easy to jump between clients.

The server needs to be backed up though

Sync between devices. I only read RSS on one device so I don't need it either. Besides if you don't think a service is useful to you why do you host it?

After years of using Feeder on my phone and some other random stuff on my laptop, I switched to FreshRSS on my server and the big thing is everything stays synced. My read and stared articles are all where they should be. I run fluent reader on all my devices and tailscale keeps me always connected to my reader so I can save articles on my phone when I don't have time to read them then read them when I get home on my laptop or tablet.

In addition to the other positives, I Miniflux with YouTube subscriptions. No ads and no tracking when set up with invidious proxies.

I used to pay Inoreader for the premium features they offer, but now I get them for free with FreshRss on my server. It's not exposed to the world but I can wireguard in when I need. Works great, basically maintenance free.

Miniflux is possibly the most important thing I self host. It tells me when software updates (basically everything on GitHub has RSS). It's also great to keep up with blogs that don't update consistently and also stay out of the "there are only three websites" bubble.

Maybe you don't run anything worth subscribing to for yourself but if youre running services that have any kind of updates you want to notify people of RSS would be a way to do it. Any kind of blog can have an RSS feed of new posts, you could have a feed of the newest files uploaded to a site.

RSS readers like freshrss let you subscribe to other RSS feeds, so in that case they just work as any other RSS reader.

I use nextcloud to collate all my RSS feeds, I can then access them all from the nextcloud web UI or the mobile app

I have a self hosted freshRSS but I still just use the Feeder app 99.9% of the time. I guess I just keep Fresh as a backup in case the Feeder app ever goes down.

Yeah, it seems like such an unnecessary layer! Why login to your desktop, phone etc then have to login to a server also? I prefer to just open an application that has the feeds direct from source!