Nice! I actually didn’t know they had RSS feeds at all, so I’m going to help my news junky friend get set up with them. Thanks for the tip on the ABC RSS! :)
Right now I’ve got NetNewsWire configured to use my iCloud account (which uses CloudKit under the hood), so that syncs my iPhone and iPad. This still involves a 3rd party - Apple’s magic hosted database service thing - but I’m ok with this for now.
Ideally I would set up something like FreshRSSand host it on one of my own servers. FreshRSS exposes the old Google Reader API which NetNewsWire and Reeder can use to sync feeds. Personally I’m not interested in the FreshRSS web interface and I’m not too keen on running a PHP app either. So I’m considering writing my own service which serves the bare minimum required to be able to point apps like NetNewsWire and Reeder at.