Hacker News Reader

Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

And this is why Google Reader was amazing. There we were, my friends and I, reading RSS feeds and liking/sharing/commenting amongst ourselves.

pours one out

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(waves)

Said in a recent thread how much butthurt I still hold towards Google over the fate of Reader. Stupid shortsighted idiots at Google for deprecating Reader.

Maddening they gave it up for freaking horrible Google+.

I'm pretty happy they did, since it made me aware of feedly, which is much nicer!

Tried feedly and it did not stick for reasons I no longer recall :-)

https://theoldreader.com/ does the job perfectly

Former Bloglines dev here. I prefer https://www.inoreader.com/

Ultimately, I ended up with Digg Reader. Don't remember exactly how many platforms I tried, maybe a half dozen?.

Feedly was one contender, The Old Reader was another.

The primary reason I settled on Digg is that they came out with an iPhone app relatively quickly after they launched. Regrettably, their iPhone app has been broken for maybe 6 months now. Digg used an OAuth web-view embedded user agent. Google appears to no longer to support such requests from apps. Digg needs to update the app with Google's other authentication libraries.

Might have to find a new platform again. sigh...

Annnnnnd I've just opened an account with inoreader. Probably will make a jump over. Digg has annoyed me long enough. They can't find / pay a reliable IOS developer.

I see this promise in Mastodon. Under the hood it's just Atom + extensions. If current blogging solutions had a mastodon extension; say if a Wordpress blog also automatically set up a Mastodon instance for you even if it's just a single identity one, you'd have liking/sharing/commenting by default.

Note: fairy new to Mastodon, not sure exactly if / how this would work, but I've been thinking about this lately.

There seems to be a few plugins like this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/mastodon/, but it's not RSS, and ultimately different. It could all potentially work together nicely, and I wish federated services like Mastodon were more widely used. They could definitely lower the burden to publishing/consuming RSS.

I don't think social news delivery/publishing is an easily monetize-able business. Out of twitter/reddit, reddit seems to have found a model that works for them. Twitter hasn't found what works yet.

I think that if each site funded it's own social delivery, there would be no single "social publishing platform" to monetize. It would be a matter of just the publishers monetizing themselves, and the social platform would be the web.

And that's the promise of Mastodon. It is free because each instance pays the cost of keeping it alive in the form of hosting their instance. Like, right now, the NYTimes acts like a "database" with all the pages, and reddit or twitter like the content distribution feed, and both need funding. But if the NYTimes had its own Mastodon instance and published there, the rest of the Mastodon network would be its content distribution feed, each federation funding itself.

As a sidetone, it even solves the problem of verification I think, because if I have the Mastodon account aylmao@nytimes.com for example, I don't need a central system to confirm that I'm working for the nytimes, like for example twitter would.

And moreover, since Mastodon is just Atom, if people want to just see feed updates they can do that, or they can get a client that supports the full social features too. I think it's pretty cool.

I've been running a Mastodon instance and kicking around ideas for enhancements. "Let users subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds" is quickly feeling like the one that would be most useful; I really miss the days of Livejournal when I could subscribe to the updates of my friends on LJ, and have stuff from the RSS/Atom feeds of other sites mixed in between them.

In chronological order, of course.

Mastodon is built on top of OStatus and ActivityPub, which are inspired by RSS' successor Atom, but sadly I don't think either is compatible, so I'm gonna be cramming an RSS/Atom library in there. Ah well. It's not like Mastodon doesn't already have a dependency tree as long as your arm.

Here we are now, in a line with BSS and Usenix users.

Of all the products I've used over the years that no longer exist Google Reader is the only one I still constantly miss. At least once or twice a week I think about how I wish it was still around. I use Digg now, but it's just not quite the same.

Google reader was epic! Although the development when it comes to RSS readers and such went into overdrive when Google shut it down. I think The Old Reader has replaced most of Google Reader's features, but not all of them by any means.

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