Hacker News Reader

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)

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.

I still use NetNewsWire.

Reeder also uses iCloud for syncing which is what I’m using since I’m already paying for the service (iCloud).

I went years without consuming RSS until I discovered Fraidy Cat[1] here at Hacker News.

1. https://fraidyc.at

me too but i came back with yarr reader https://github.com/nkanaev/yarr

This actually looks a better paradigm than the firehose of RSS feeds (even if grouped by tags/categories). Thank you for sharing this.

Perfect! Thank you.

Yeah, I was a huge fan of FeedDemon at the time. Unfortunately, it was updated to be primarily a local Google Reader client and lost many users to Google Reader itself. Development stopped around the time Reader was canceled. I ended up switching to Newsblur and have been using it ever since through (mostly) the web interface. I've switched to Mac/iOS since then as well and have tried out NetNewsWire and Reeder. Both are excellent and sync with Newsblur, but neither support Newsblur's social features, which are important to me.

I love being able to read others' comments, leave my own, and receive replies from a community of folks who are all committed enough to RSS as a medium to keep at it. I find it provides a significant amount of value. It also aids in discovery of new blogs/sites that I've ended up following directly over the years.

Feedly is indeed great, I just wish they'd stop trying to add AI and automated topic highlighting which clearly doesn't work.

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-.... Fortunately, the stakes are low, since patients who don't find the right clinical trial for cancers will only die.

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?

Have you tried Lenna.io? I’d guess no, but it could regard some of the pains. (Disclosure - a product I work on)

I'd guess no too, since there's no site at that domain.

Yeah their AI efforts are weird. It's like they are ashamed of "just" making an excellent product for rss, and want to do something special but nothing useful, at least for me, came out of it do far. TBH, I'm ok with them just being an excellent rss reader and will keep paying for it.

I think they're adding lot of these features as incentives to entice users to switch to their subscription service. Not sure what percentage of their users pay for the subscription.

I actually signed up for AI enabled plan out of curiosity (I had non AI subscription for years prior). Had to downgrade back because it was too annoying and I couldn't figure out how to make it stop completely. Whoever inside the company is pushing this is not doing them a service.

Feedly seems like a company that is trying anything that will stick to get people to subscribe without getting rid of their free offering.

Their free plan is likely enough for most people. I know for me none of those features matter.

Especially since I just never log into Feedly themselves. I just use the Reeder app as my frontend and have gone a couple years without logging in. I also just don't change my actual feeds much.

This is a great example of a business built on what should not really be a business. There are certain types of things that are fundamental to the internet, and trying to sell a premium version of that is always an uphill battle.

Imagine that in 2024 I tried to sell you a web browser. One that maybe has a slightly cleaner UI or some fancy plugin system but ultimately is just a plain old browser. Maybe some very small percentage of people would pay for it, but most are entirely happy with the free and FOSS choices available since the core features of a browser are standard.

RSS by all means should be similar: just like ping, cat, sh, browsers, email clients, video players, etc. the core features are well defined and an open source project should be the default choice. If you want something fancy or proprietary then sure you should be free to pay for it. But I can’t imagine wanting to build a company that pays salaries around any of this.

There are situations where a person or a team of 2-3 can make a lifestyle business out of selling something that I have seen referred to as “legacy software” (this doesn’t mean old, but rather fundamental and “boring”, aka the Linux kernel). But Feedly competes with its own free product and cannot see the forest for the trees.

> RSS by all means should be similar: just like ping, cat, sh,

I must say that reading an RSS feed is as simple as this:

wget "myURL" -O - | python3 -c ' import sys import xml.etree.ElementTree as et tree = et.fromstring(sys.stdin.read()) for el in tree.findall("./channel/item"): print(el.find("title").text)'

But the other applications that you mention are not simple applications:

> browsers, email clients, video players, etc. the core features are well defined and an open source project should be the default choice.

[1] _ Sample URL: "https://www.tomshardware.com/feeds/all"

Honestly I struggle to think of a more complicated program than a modern browser that expects to fully support the existing web.

While I get where you are going with open source project being the default choice, I don't think it fits the example here.

Feedly, like Google Reader, for me is nothing but a server. It's the same reason I pay for my email, iCloud, and similar services. I am paying for them to store data, run some service, or similar for me.

Even if I went the open source route I would still want a server that is doing the fetching for me. A central place to keep things in sync between multiple devices and to cut down on the data usage when on my phone. That server costs money to run. Either I am running that server myself (and taking on the Maintence of it) or I pay a service like Feedly.

While I agree that Feedly's way of monetization is likely wrong when they could have just run the route of $5 a month and that's it. Nothing fancy, it fetches and thats it. That could be a perfectly sustainable business model.

Edit:

Also I really think we should re-examine "open source should be the default" when the vast majority of open source projects are not at the polish of something like Chromium.

Most average (non technical) consumers are not really going to accept what a lot of open source's experience is. See gimp and open office compared to Photoshop and Microsoft Office.

The wild thing is, that’s almost exactly what Netscape was doing back in mid and late 90s. I think the commercial versions (ie the one you bought in a box at Babbage’s or Electronic Boutique), had an HTML editor, and some more integrated file types. I don’t really remember. I never bought it, because the free beta version was enough.

It works alright, and TBH it's time RSS readers moved PAST google reader and add more useful features. Deduplciation, AI summarization etc. Stuff that helps manage RSS for those with lots of feeds, as one is likely to accumulate over time.

Feedly is great, but it baffles me it still doesn't support notifications on Android. It's strictly pull, and I'm now used to push.

this is what made me switch to innoreader

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.

> 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).

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.

Feedbin is so great. Easy filtering, can process newsletters, etc etc. Very reasonably price. Highly recommended.

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.

NewsBlur user here too. I just want something that's as close to Google Reader as possible, and that's it.

> 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.

> 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?

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.

Probably, they are like me, meaning we seem not to be on the same page as you regarding the term 'podcast'. To me, a podcast is just an audio talk session, mastered and distributed as a digital audio file. That's it. Distribution can take many forms, but the podcast is the file. 10 or so minutes of google-based research seems to offer support to this notion.

> universe of media distribution that happens via an open protocol that is not controlled by any one company

What is this protocol that you speak of? Searching "podcast protocol" leads to absolutely no useful links on the subject. Podcasts in my experience are distributed in one of three ways:

* Download links on a web page

* Embedded streaming links on a web page

* An RSS feed

That last (RSS) could be considered a "protocol" of sorts, I suppose. At the very least it's what I would expect a podcast app to support. But you then go on to refer to RSS as a separate entity from your "podcast protocol", so I'm back to being confused as to what you might be talking about. What is this open protocol that is intrinsic to your definition of 'podcast'?

RSS can be considered a syndication protocol, or a 'standard' if you want to be strict with the term protocol, but nothing about those distinctions is pertinent to the point I was making.

Podcast can refer both to individual episodes or to the series of episodes, neither usage is more correct than the other, it's your responsibility to interpret words in good faith in the context in which they're used. And again, nothing about this distinction is pertinent to the point I was making.

RSS is not the same thing as podcasts, because while generally all podcast feeds are distributed via RSS/Atom, they aren't necessarily, and moreover not all RSS feeds are podcasts.

And again, nothing about this distinction is pertinent to the point I was making. To reiterate, Apple, with the iPod, was instrumental in elevating podcasts to a mainstream medium of content distribution. It's by analogy to this that I make the point that Google could have played a similar role in facilitating the mass adoption of RSS.

I'm not interested in any further exploration of the conceptual differences between RSS and podcasts unless you believe it has an upshot that's relevant to the original point I was making.

> RSS is not the same thing as podcasts

Well, yeah. Not only is it not the same thing, the concepts aren't related in any way.

A podcast is an audio file. RSS is a format for publishing the information that you've updated your website.

>>> 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.

We had that before podcasts. You go to a web page, and you download a file. The protocol is called "HTTP", the HyperText Transfer Protocol.

Where do podcasts come into this?

> a podcast is just an audio talk session, mastered and distributed as a digital audio file

Traditional talk radio uploaded to a web page would meet that definition. And that's the stereotypical genre of podcast content but there are others, like narrative fiction (Welcome to Night Vale).

I think "a podcast" is less about the specific genre of the content and more about how it's experienced. It's a podcast if it's time-based media you can subscribe to and experience in a variety of players; otherwise, it's sparkling media.

If you have to use the Spotify app, it's not a podcast. I see "plus" subscription options in the iPhone Podcast app, if you had to use that app, they're not podcasts; if you can use different apps but only on Apple devices, I'd still consider them podcasts.

thanks to WordPress

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Newsblur was offering a decent alternative free layer.

https://blog.newsblur.com/2013/03/17/three-months-to-scale-n...

https://blog.newsblur.com/2014/03/13/google-reader-announced...

I haven't used it in a while but https://theoldreader.com/ seemed like a fairly drop-in replacement for Google Reader.

I still use it daily. It is a decent substitute.

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.

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.

I mean... sure. Even paid services eventually shut down.

But I have far more confidence in something at least making sense for the company to keep running if it is something I pay for vs something that is just given away for free.

If I am relying on an online service, while paying for it doesn't guarantee it being up it's a safer bet than a free one.

Netvibes was/is free, Google Reader didn't work nearly as well for me when I tried it.

Your mentality of expecting everything to be free is why there are no alternatives, and also why Google Reader shut down. Building and maintaining these services isn't free, so when people don't want to pay for it there's no incentive to actually make or maintain such service.

An RSS Reader is really a technical miracle, requiring lots of maintenance and development effort. I guess a 10€/Month Subscription would be just the minimum for a such an cutting edge product, right?

Right. Even if we want to say that it could take a one time deployment and it can just sit there forever (which, it can't. it needs security updates and similar).

The server itself isn't free. Sure if they are smart if multiple people are subscribed to the same feed it only fetches once, but just the constant fetching would eat up resources. Then storing that data, you retrieving it yourself, etc.

Most email apps at the time supported rss

>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.

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.