https://bazqux.com/
It doesn't check all your boxes but it checks all mine.
I've used elfeed, google reader, feedly, miniflux, and this is the best!
Not free but I'm happy to pay $30/year for excellence.
Desktop and mobile app both work great.
Has all the right key shortcuts.
Fast.
Tagging and stars (but I never use em).
Some excerpts from the FAQ:
How long do you keep articles unread?
Unread articles are kept forever. Although there is a limit of 500 total (both read and unread) articles per feed.
How often feeds are updated?
Refresh rate depends on the time of the last article in feed: few hours ago—each 15–45 minutes, less than a week—each 1–2 hours, less than a month—each 2–3 hours and 3+ hours for others. Feeds that support WebSub are updated in realtime.
Do you support password protected feeds?
Yes, feeds with HTTP basic access authentication are supported.
How many feeds I can subscribe to?
You can subscribe or import up to 3000 feeds.
You can self-host easily, and you get all your feed items by email where you can filter, archive, and search them easily. Having the items end up in your email is easier than having to share state in a database and cope with different laptop vs. phone vs. desktop views, etc.
I self-host Tiny Tiny RSS (https://tt-rss.org/). I think it will do everything you want (and more). The web UI is fine, and the Android app is great. It's actively developed, has been around for over a decade (I have been using it since Google Reader shut down) and has been super stable.
I guess the only thing it doesn't have that a SaaS offering could do would be some sort of recommendation engine (which I have no interest in).
I wrote my own from scratch including the HTML/XML parsers. If you can't pick a reader the next best option is to write it yourself. There are countless projects on GitHub in any language.
From a desktop app's point of view, I have tried liferea for a while and liked it a lot.
I'm not using anymore though, because the websites I used to follow went behind captcha mechanism(s) and cannot fetch their feed any longer which saddens me just by thinking about it.
Seamonkey. With a bookmarklet to go to the archive version of the current page (to bypass paywalls), it can do everything you want. If, as suggested by your want of self-hosting, you want something centrally located that will allow you to seamlessly track feeds across devices, all options suck, whether paid or free. You're probably better off just writing a program in your language of choice (I've never seen a language without one or more RSS/atom-specific libs, let alone plain XML) to meet your own needs rather than banging your head against the wall of someone else's pet that does what they need but isn't perfect for you.
You didn't mention a mobile app or cloud sync as one of your priorities, so any offline, desktop RSS feeder should provide most of these features.
I use Elfeed in Emacs, which satisfies all your requirements -- except bypassing paywalls -- and is the best RSS reader I've ever used. For context, I've used at least ten RSS readers since 2005 before finding Elfeed in 2018.
https://bazqux.com/ It doesn't check all your boxes but it checks all mine. I've used elfeed, google reader, feedly, miniflux, and this is the best! Not free but I'm happy to pay $30/year for excellence. Desktop and mobile app both work great. Has all the right key shortcuts. Fast. Tagging and stars (but I never use em).
Some excerpts from the FAQ:
How long do you keep articles unread? Unread articles are kept forever. Although there is a limit of 500 total (both read and unread) articles per feed. How often feeds are updated? Refresh rate depends on the time of the last article in feed: few hours ago—each 15–45 minutes, less than a week—each 1–2 hours, less than a month—each 2–3 hours and 3+ hours for others. Feeds that support WebSub are updated in realtime. Do you support password protected feeds? Yes, feeds with HTTP basic access authentication are supported. How many feeds I can subscribe to? You can subscribe or import up to 3000 feeds.
https://netnewswire.com/
Though it may not meet your criteria around infinite retention. The developer has written about their philosophy on that here: https://inessential.com/2018/10/13/netnewswire_article_age_l...
I wrote a simple "RSS to Email" application, there are a bunch out there, but I think that is simple and portable.
https://github.com/skx/rss2email/
You can self-host easily, and you get all your feed items by email where you can filter, archive, and search them easily. Having the items end up in your email is easier than having to share state in a database and cope with different laptop vs. phone vs. desktop views, etc.
I self-host Tiny Tiny RSS (https://tt-rss.org/). I think it will do everything you want (and more). The web UI is fine, and the Android app is great. It's actively developed, has been around for over a decade (I have been using it since Google Reader shut down) and has been super stable.
I guess the only thing it doesn't have that a SaaS offering could do would be some sort of recommendation engine (which I have no interest in).
I wrote my own from scratch including the HTML/XML parsers. If you can't pick a reader the next best option is to write it yourself. There are countless projects on GitHub in any language.
Probably not really usable for anyone except myself but here is the code for my reader: https://github.com/vborovikov/news
I have found this article https://www.tecmint.com/best-rss-feed-readers-for-linux/ and has some nice self-hosted options.
From a desktop app's point of view, I have tried liferea for a while and liked it a lot.
I'm not using anymore though, because the websites I used to follow went behind captcha mechanism(s) and cannot fetch their feed any longer which saddens me just by thinking about it.
Feedly has a freemium model. It certainly allows tagging feeds; don't think it allows tagging articles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedly
Have you checked out https://lighthouseapp.io/?
Have you tried https://www.freshrss.org/ ?
For a nice UI, I'd personally use Read You on Android, and NetNewsWire on iOS
Miniflux
I moved to Miniflux from Nextcloud News a few years ago after News stopped working after an update.
It is likely one of my favourite pieces of software that I host myself. Doesn’t take a lot of resources, quick and simple UI, and just works.
I hate their PostgreSQL dependency
Seamonkey. With a bookmarklet to go to the archive version of the current page (to bypass paywalls), it can do everything you want. If, as suggested by your want of self-hosting, you want something centrally located that will allow you to seamlessly track feeds across devices, all options suck, whether paid or free. You're probably better off just writing a program in your language of choice (I've never seen a language without one or more RSS/atom-specific libs, let alone plain XML) to meet your own needs rather than banging your head against the wall of someone else's pet that does what they need but isn't perfect for you.
You didn't mention a mobile app or cloud sync as one of your priorities, so any offline, desktop RSS feeder should provide most of these features.
I use Elfeed in Emacs, which satisfies all your requirements -- except bypassing paywalls -- and is the best RSS reader I've ever used. For context, I've used at least ten RSS readers since 2005 before finding Elfeed in 2018.
FreshRSS might be worth a look. Has most, if not all, of what you're looking for. The paywall ladder might require a plugin.
emacs elfeed