Until recently, if you asked me to recommend a self-hosted RSS reader, I would have pointed you towards every geeks favorite, Tiny Tiny RSS.
I’ve never really appreciated the “star” feature as popularize by GMail. I get that you’d want to “Like” a status update, or “Favorite” a tweet, since you’re providing feedback to another user, but what good does it do to single out something that only you’ll see?
I can’t speak for everyone but I can tell you how I use the star feature. I have about 75 or so RSS feeds that I check daily. A lot of it is news items and I can consume the headlines and summary quickly and move on. Sometimes, they are longer articles or things I want to make notes on as I read. I star those things each day during the week as I process my RSS feed. Then, on the weekend, I go back to my starred items to review in detail.
Good point! I’m particularly bad at that - I queue up heaps of valuable RSS feeds, and then don’t pay enough attention to triaging them. I’m hoping that Inoreader / FieryFeeds “smart folders” will help with that, to an extent. Instead of starring articles (I guess I have no faith in myself going back to read them), I send them to Instapaper for a longer read at my leisure.
The advantage to Instapaper is that I can highlight / annotate each article, and then export the highlights / annotations in Markdown, to turn them into blog posts.