Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Google Reader shut down nearly 12 years ago. Its legacy now is that there are still people who are pissed off about that, and I get the impression that a surprising amount of them are now in positions where they get to make purchasing decisions over whether or not to buy Google Cloud.

(Being a Mac+iPhone person I've settled in quite happily with NetNewsWire now, but it took me a few years to get there.)

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My distrust of Google certainly started with the shutdown of Reader. Everything they've done since has made it worse. I was in the position to choose a cloud provider several years ago and would not even consider GCP. I seriously doubt they'll kill GCP, but I see no reason to take a chance on anything Google does outside of search, docs, mail and the core things.

The fact that they shut down Google domains (and cloud domains now uses squarespace, who bought Google domains) shows that you can't necessarily trust they won't shut down critical GCP services either.

It is unlikely Google will shut down GMail, but at an individual level you can lose access to it without any warning. I no longer trust it as my primary email.

My self hosted FreshRSS instance is better than Google Reader ever was.

Just about every website and service I use has feeds.

People/geeks are rediscovering RSS.

I think this might be the golden age of RSS.

I recently discovered that FreshRSS has a built-in xPath parser/webscrapper[1] so you can actually subscribe to any website, even if it doesn't have an actual feed.

It's not straightforward to use because of the lack of a test/debug interface, but its worth the effort to set it up!

[1]: https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/users/11_website_scra...

Self-hosted FreshRSS + NetNewsWire on Mac and iOS/iPadOS is my combo of choice, works great. After Reader died I migrated to Feedly for a while, but self-hosting the backend and not having ads injected + being able to debug and properly manage feeds is way nicer.

We chose GCP, and the work to accommodate restructuring of services (currently container registry to artifacts) is indeed an annoying.

They tried to force the free GSuite editions into paid a year or two ago.

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