What are your personal opinions about having a deficated rss reader like miniflux (or others) vs just having a notification bot linked to a matrix room?
The public matrix rss bots never worked for me and were essentially useless missing months of notifications, so now that I have my own homelab server, I finally want to take matters into my own hands.
But I’m still unsure if I should want to stick with my own instance of matrix-rss bot or if something more, like miniflux is better.
What are your opinions/experience?

You can consider selfhosting maubot + RSS plugin if you wanna keep using Matrix

I find that a dedicated RSS reader is a much better experience, as, especially when you've got a lot if feeds, organising them and keeping track of what you've read becomes quite important. If you take your eye off of a chat based system, you're going to have so many unread messages it'll be hard to keep up.

I can highly recommend feed2exec. It's super flexible and lets you easily do anything off the back of an RSS feed item. This way you can abstract away the matrix side and write a minimal matrix plugin to send to matrix rooms, or you can generate static html pages to self-host, or anything else you want within the same framework.

I use it to:

• Save RSS feed entries as plain-text files, so I can read them in less
• Download podcasts, running a pass of ffmpeg over each to reduce file size
• Watch releases of open source projects and add a task in taskwarrior for me to review and/or update them

I use the news app in nextcloud, you can view the RSS feeds in the web ui or the mobile app. It's all the same

I prefer dedicated RSS readers, in particular FreshRSS

Miniflux works great, I love it. You can even try their hosted version on their website.

I used miniflux for a long time, it's great. But my server went down a couple of times over the years, and i couldn't fix it while being away from home.

I ended up using an RSS app on my phone (Feedflow), as i don't consume news on my desktop. And I enjoy this much more. If my server goes down, i can still read my news

Matrix solution always worked good for me