I've been using rss2email (https://github.com/wking/rss2email) to read rss feeds in mutt. It works well for me.

I actually use this already.

I think my dissatisfaction with mutt + rss2email is more about RSS in general. It amounts to just being a short description of the article and a hyperlink, and at that point I might as well just load these websites in my browser.

I need a better article scraper. General solutions that try to detect content, like Firefox's article mode and similar, don't do enough.

We need youtube-dl for text.

Maybe a little more heavy handed but I use huginn for exactly that. Read in numerous RSS feeds and digest them into my email box. It does a lot more than that too.

https://github.com/cantino/huginn

Wow I can't believe I've never heard of this. This is cool. Thanks for posting it.

Shameless plug: I use sinntp[0] to grab newsgroup messages and put them into a mailbox. You can also configure mutt so that it can post to newsgroups (see doc/mutt-integration.txt).

[0] http://jwilk.net/software/sinntp

This looks like good software. I'm going to try using this to replace slrn. If it's okay with you, I'll email you in a couple weeks with an update.

Alpine has NNTP support.

Not quite what you want, but in the same spirit of Mutt is Newsbeuter.

http://newsbeuter.org/

You could use rss2email on a cron-job to mail you RSS things - it's not as pretty as a console reader, but it might help?