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I am glad at least that most sites continue to support rss feeds, whether or not they support it knowingly or if the software they use just happens to include i

• cbovis 3y ago
  Feedbin filled the void for me and have been a subscriber ever since. Can't believe it's been ten years. Hoping that the developer made bank.
  • trauco 3y ago
    Feedbin is so great. Easy filtering, can process newsletters, etc etc. Very reasonably price. Highly recommended.
  • yellow_postit 3y ago
    For me it’s been NewsBlur — every time I get the itch to find a new reader I decide it’s not worth the hassle of learning a new UI.
    • stavros 3y ago
      NewsBlur user here too. I just want something that's as close to Google Reader as possible, and that's it.
• salamanderman 3y ago
  My recollection when trying to find a Google Reader alternative was that there was no free alternative. Everything at the time that I found had been a premium alternative to Reader before it shut down.
  • markx2 3y ago
    Newsblur was offering a decent alternative free layer. https://blog.newsblur.com/2013/03/17/three-months-to-scale-newsblur/ https://blog.newsblur.com/2013/03/17/three-months-to-scale-n... https://blog.newsblur.com/2014/03/13/google-reader-announced-its-shutdown-exactly-a-year-ago/ https://blog.newsblur.com/2014/03/13/google-reader-announced...
  • gitonup 3y ago
    I haven't used it in a while but https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/ seemed like a fairly drop-in replacement for Google Reader.
    • Uhhrrr 3y ago
      I still use it daily. It is a decent substitute.
  • nerdjon 3y ago
    Feedly is free depending on how many feeds you need. But that is likely part of why reader shut down. Depending on how often it's pulling and how often you are reading, that isn't free to run. Especially if you don't even use their app to read your feeds, you may never be able to see an ad. Would rather pay for it personally so I know it's there.
    • vdaea 3y ago
      Paying does not guarantee anything. It does not guarantee a more reliable service, it does not guarantee that they will hear you out when they change a feature or the design, ruining it, and it does not guarantee it won't shut down tomorrow. They will refund you, and you will have your money back, but you will have no service, and you will be back in square one.
• puttycat 3y ago
  Feedly is indeed great, I just wish they'd stop trying to add AI and automated topic highlighting which clearly doesn't work.
  • woleium 3y ago
    this is what made me switch to innoreader
  • jseliger 3y ago
    I just wish they'd stop trying to add AI and automated topic highlighting which clearly doesn't work. A bunch of companies are also doing or attempting to do AI and automated trial finding for clinical trials, and that's not working either: https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-too-quickly https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-.... Fortunately, the stakes are low, since patients who don't find the right clinical trial for cancers will only die.
    • orzig 3y ago
      Do you think the solution is better software, or is real blocker on the business/policy/cultural/incentives side? Inspired by that series I looked into building a better front end for clinical trials.gov but after seeing a few organizations try similar approaches without (yet) nailing it, I became convinced that I’d become one more classic naive-technologist story. But have the existing approaches really missed a low hanging solution, even if it’s partial and maybe impossible to monetize?
  • stanislavb 3y ago
    Have you tried Lenna.io? I’d guess no, but it could regard some of the pains. (Disclosure - a product I work on)
    • stavros 3y ago
      I'd guess no too, since there's no site at that domain.
  • 3y ago
• smsm42 3y ago
  Not only Feedly. When greader was shut down, there was at least half dozen other apps, some of which were pretty good. I liked feedly the most so I never checked the rest but I know they weren't unique.
• sinanisler 3y ago
  thanks to WordPress
• blihp 3y ago
  Yes, there were 2-3 other (mostly web-based) services that stepped in with Feedly being the main one. However, by that time the popular client-side tools had been pretty much been wiped out due to years of Google's free offering. For some of us, that's what killed the user-facing RSS market. (I was so fed up I ended up cobbling together my own solution... far from anything polished but I'm happier with it than I was with any of the offerings available at the time)
  • nerdjon 3y ago
    I never looked at clients other than the Reeder app (not google reader), but that is iOS and Mac only. Even supports local pulling (not sure if it always did though, never thought to check until now). I imagine that didn't help Google's situation either. Here I was using their servers and never going to the website except to do the occasional subscription modification.
    • wyclif 3y ago
      I still use NetNewsWire.
    • Polyphonie 3y ago
      Reeder also uses iCloud for syncing which is what I’m using since I’m already paying for the service (iCloud).
  • dsaravel 3y ago
    I went years without consuming RSS until I discovered Fraidy Cat[1] here at Hacker News. 1. https://fraidyc.at https://fraidyc.at
    • grigio 3y ago
      me too but i came back with yarr reader https://github.com/nkanaev/yarr https://github.com/nkanaev/yarr
    • jskherman 3y ago
      This actually looks a better paradigm than the firehose of RSS feeds (even if grouped by tags/categories). Thank you for sharing this.
• vdaea 3y ago
  >I may be misremembering but didn't Feedly step up very quickly? Even offering the ability to easily migrate everything over. Other rss readers were either much different (think cards design, or too much whitespace everywhere, or whatever), or they had premium plans they were telling you about all the time, or they had premium plans and a low limit of rss feeds you could add, or they had no mobile apps, or the mobile apps required premium, or whatever. Nothing was like google reader: free, information-dense, and reliable. When google reader was killed, rss died for me.
  • glenstein 3y ago
    Right, I think you've hit the essence of the issue here. Those alternatives were definitely there, but there's an order of magnitude difference between them and Google in terms of what they did for the normalization of RSS as a way of consuming content. Saying Google stopped supporting RSS but at least there's a boutique alternative, I think is kind of saying well Coca-Cola shut down but at least there's Soda Stream. Not wrong, but it misses the point that there's a global embeddedness that was left behind.
• Hamuko 3y ago
  I use FreshRSS and it has pretty powerful tools to scrape content from sites without an RSS feed using XPath. Highly recommend for self-hosters.
  • thelandofrandom 3y ago
    [dead]
  • brimwats 3y ago
    I never found a good setup / getting started guide on using xpath with FreshRSS, so I'd love to hear how you're using it
• glenstein 3y ago
  > may be misremembering but didn't Feedly step up very quickly? Even offering the ability to easily migrate everything over. I remember the same thing as you, so I think that's correct. But I would say Feedly probably only recouped some single digit percentage of Google readers users. But then there were however many other users who had their relationship with RSS forever fractured from the shutdown of Google reader, and the absence of a smooth off-ramp certainly contributed. I also think that having the credibility of Google behind RSS contributed to people being comfortable with them, not unlike iPods helping lead to the adoption of podcasts. I shudder to think whether podcasts would even have gotten off the ground without people being socialized into accepting them through the connection to an Apple product. And while I'm not an Apple fan I'm forever grateful for the long term impact on how we consume content. So I would say the long and short of it is that Feedly helped, but I suspect it was perhaps an order of magnitude smaller in terms of its role as a positive force for RSS than Google.
  • thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > not unlike iPods helping lead to the adoption of podcasts. Podcasts are named after the iPod, because that's who the audience was. They are radio shows that are recorded and then made available for download; other than the usual lack of melody, they are identical to other mp3 files. Spoken-word musical albums and books on tape were already well-established phenomena before the iPod existed. What's the difference supposed to be?
    • glenstein 3y ago
      The difference is in achieving the mass adoption of podcasting as a fully mainstream distribution medium. With podcasts, we now have an entire universe of media distribution that happens via an open protocol that is not controlled by any one company, which is a miracle. There was no guarantee that it would turn out that way, and, as we see with RSS, or now with Activitypub, it's more than a small struggle to get anyone to care about open protocols for their own sake. It takes a moment that is ripe for it, a simple enough experience, and some sort of cultural signal that it's "for everyone" in a sense. That was my point. I am perfectly aware that audio can be distributed in other forms.
• Telemakhos 3y ago
  There were plenty of RSS readers. Many browsers had them built in: Mozilla called them "Live Bookmarks" and even Safari once had an RSS reader. I used apps like Reeder and ReadKit and loved them, but my favorite apps were probably newsboat and newsbeuter (CLI RSS readers; newsbeuter goes back to 2007). It's like people forgot that non-web-interface rss readers existed. I still use some RSS reader apps to keep up with various sites I care about. Also, remember that ever podcast is also an RSS feed.
  • mtrower 3y ago
    > It's like people forgot that non-web-interface rss readers existed. I'd wager that a lot of people never even knew these existed. To a lot of people, the browser became (or simply always was) the only real interface to everything internet related (or for some people, just about everything period).
• talonx 3y ago
  There were definitely alternatives. I remember trying to import my Google Reader OPML into Feedly and getting a gateway timeout (the file was too big and the backend was still processing it - synchronously - when the front end nginx gave up). I eventually ended up using InoReader but stopped after the number of feeds exceeded their free limit. Now it's just a locally hosted Tiny Tiny RSS on my laptop.
• zs234465234165 3y ago
  Most email apps at the time supported rss