April 21, 2026
When RSS met Robot Drama
Show HN: Antenna – RSS reader with a built-in MCP server
Hacker crowd loses it over ‘offline’ news app that feeds their AI and their inbox
TLDR: A developer launched Antenna, a DIY news app that keeps your subscriptions on your own computer, emails you updates, and can feed them to an AI assistant. The community is hyped about taking power back from ad-filled platforms, but split over whether this is freedom or just nerds overcomplicating reading again.
Hacker News just met its new obsession: Antenna, a do-it-yourself news reader that lives on your laptop, emails you articles, and even feeds your favorite AI assistant — all without touching Big Tech’s cloud. The creator pitched it as “your news, your file, your rules,” and the comment section instantly split into three loud camps.
On one side, the local-first fanatics are treating this like a religious awakening. People who still mourn Google Reader are calling it “the RSS comeback tour,” cheering that their reading list is finally not trapped inside some company’s website. Privacy hawks are giddy at the idea of no hidden tracking, no mystery algorithms, and definitely no “surprise, we sold your data” moments.
Then come the eye-rollers. Some are roasting the setup steps—virtual environments, config files, scheduled tasks—as “the perfect app for people who think editing YAML is self-care.” Others joke that Antenna is basically “email newsletters for people who hate newsletters, plus a robot butler.”
The true drama, though, is around the AI angle. One camp loves that their chatbot can now search and summarize their feeds like a personal researcher. The other camp is grumbling that we’ve turned a simple news reader into “an AI theme park” and just want a chill way to read blogs without talking to a robot at all. Meme of the day: “Finally, my emails, my AI, and my neuroses in one SQLite file.”
Key Points
- •Antenna is a local-first, MIT-licensed RSS reader that stores subscriptions in a local SQLite database and routes new posts to both email and AI agents via MCP.
- •The tool emphasizes user control by avoiding vendor clouds and lock-in, keeping the subscription graph in a file the user controls and exposing it to agents through an MCP server.
- •Antenna generates per-post or digest HTML emails via the user’s own SMTP provider, with rule-based filtering, deduplication, conditional GET, URL rewriting, and a dry-run preview mode.
- •An MCP interface over stdio provides tools such as list_sources, subscribe, search_posts, and get_post, all backed by the same SQLite index used for email delivery.
- •Installation involves setting up a Python virtual environment, importing OPML from other readers, scheduling periodic fetches (via launchd or cron), and integrating with MCP clients like Claude Desktop; Phase 0 code is publicly available on GitHub.