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After thoroughly destroying my #TinyTinyRSS install through neglect (I had been on the old Linuxserver.io image since they discontinued publishing updates), I stood up a new fresh install and managed to import my feeds. It was a very unhinged process since the original install was dead and I did not have an OPML file anywhere for my subscriptions.

What killed it? Well... an update to MySQL 9.0. It changed the authentication in a way that breaks legacy auth and thus the 5-year-old version of TTRSS I had been running. It probably would have been possible to get it back up and running by exporting the database back into a MySQL 8.4 container, but that seemed like a lot of work for very out-of-date software. There was also no clear migration path since the author of TTRSS had long ago abandoned support for MySQL and there are only a handful of dubious third party migratrion utilities out there. There really wasn't much history to save, so I figured the best thing to do was start fresh, but saving my existing subscriptions if I could.

First, I had to connect to the DB and pull all of the feed URLs out of the DB for my user account into a text file. Then I had to use a utility to convert it into an OPML file using a random GitHub utility. https://github.com/andysylvester/urls-to-opml

The utility in question would regularly barf on URLs that didn't respond in a timely manner, so I had to prune a handful of dead ones. Then I had to fix some illegal characters in the file (such as ampersands) so it would actually import.

After importing, I realized just how many dead feeds I had. Websites that hadn't updated in a decade or more, or ones that had simply vanished from the Internet. So many of them belonged to friends that blogged until social media (primarily Facebook) gobbled up their limited attention. It was a regular graveyard of an Internet long ago killed by centralization.