Google Reader Alternatives | Hacker News Reader

Google Reader Alternatives

lifehacker.com

40 pointsfraqed44 comments

What I find most appealing about Google Reader is the simplicity of the interface. I just want to see a list of the sites I'm following, an indicator when new content is available, a summary of the content, and the ability to view the full content. That's it. Nothing flashy, nothing social, just the Emacs (or even vi) of RSS readers.

Newsblur comes closest for me so far, but I suspect I'll end up rolling my own.

looking for a simple alternative I found http://bazqux.com/ . You do have to pay for it (That was one of my requirements - that might be a barrier for some)

OMG, thanks. Finally a reader as fast as Google reader.

What I like about Reader is the speed.

Newsblur feels slow and bloated and of all the RSS readers I have tried it was the best.

So now I just said fuck it and I'm working on my own reader using much of the work from http://rsslounge.aditu.de/

I agree with your first paragraph. However, I'm still hoping that Reeder will support NewsBlur (or maybe another service) so that I can continue to read my feeds offline. Internet is still not always available (and if available, sometimes only very slow or very expensive). That's why I still appreciate offline reading.

Same here. I don't care about someone else's algorithms for finding me news stories or any social aspects of sharing. I follow the feeds I follow and just want them served up to me in one place. And if by some random chance I want to share that with someone, I'll do that my own way. What I want from an RSS reader is just that... read my RSS. That is all.

> Newsblur comes closest for me so far

Newsblur is the opposite of what I want. I want consistent typography, and much less interface, and a google reader API compatible service so I can continue to use things like Reeder. Newsblur highlights everything but the text.

I really hope the people behind Reeder build a backend and web frontend before Google Reader goes away.

Same here. I'm ok with NewsBlur because it does what I needed from google reader: lists of feeds, lists of posts, and keyboard shortcuts to navigate between both. I actually paid for NewsBlur over Feedly just for the keyboard feed navigation.

What I miss from the keyboard shortcuts is the n/p and shift-n/p where you navigate without opening an item.

I'm currently ambivalent about the commenting/social part, but I can see it work and take off.

As long as the interface does what I want, I can ignore the fact that it's rather ugly, a bit odd here and there, and doesn't properly show the 'active' item. But I really think there should be a 'minimal' theme that emulates google reader's.

And, of course, it's currently a bit show. But I can forgive the guy for that :).

I am disappointed no one talks about hosting their own. Mod me down if you want, proud user of Tiny Tiny RSS, which comes with a Web UI, a mobile app (costs money, but still cheap), and a pretty cool API for a simple PHP app. Some of us learned our lesson, and will not moved to another crappy "service" that will shut down in a few years. Just like I do not host my blog on Posterous.

https://github.com/gothfox/Tiny-Tiny-RSS

> Honorable mentions this week go out to TinyTinyRSS, a self-hosted RSS reading app that allows you to grab your feeds on any system, as long as you have a web host and you're comfortable installing and setting it up. The process actually isn't that difficult, and full disclosure, I'm thinking about doing this myself. Since there's a Tiny Tiny RSS Android client to go with it, it's worth a look. Plus, it's free and open source, and at the end of the day you own your feeds and your data, and it won't shut down on you.

That said, I tried it and found it annoying to work with as well as incredibly slow. I paid for Newsblur and if they ever go down I'll jump into the relatively complicated installation process on my server.

edit:

And of course there are other options: Fever [1], the hopefully soon finished News [2] app for ownCloud [3] and Newsblur [4] is open source as well.

[1] http://www.feedafever.com/

[2] http://algorithmsforthekitchen.com/blog/?p=479

[3] http://owncloud.org/

[4] https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

I love Fever, and just switched to it. I included it on my own roundup at Web.AppStorm: http://web.appstorm.net/roundups/rssfeeds/google-reader-is-d.... I think people don't mention self-hosted options as much because most people would immediately think it was too much trouble to run their own service.

For someone hosting their own site already, though, it's incredibly simple to host something like this yourself. Surprising more people don't.

The lack of a trial gives Fever a big barrier I think. And from what I've seen in the video it has no way to list feeds in a minimalistic way.

I tried it and found it quite reasonable, even running it from my desktop. Is it as fast as Google Reader? Not quite, but it's not slow enough to be annoying, and certainly not "incredibly slow". Much easier to install than Newsblur.
Disclaimer: I'm a sysadmin, not a developer.

AMD 2 core 5600+, 8GB, one spinning iron disk with an SSD cache via flashcache, Debian stable, Postgres and Apache and PHP as Debian provides. Really nothing fancy.

For me it was slow enough to be annoying. Though I only installed it local (Windows) on XAMPP and not on my VPS. But considering that my machine isn't too weak (i3, 16gb ram, SSD) I expected more. Pretty much every click took 1-2 seconds.

I'm running a 6 year old fork of tt-rss on a machine w/ specs that are too embarrassing to post and I get reasonable performance. I use a Postgres back-end and I spent some time tweaking indexes to get it to perform better. I haven't kept up with the mainline tt-rss distribution-- perhaps it's become crufted-up. The older releases definitely could work well even on modest hardware.

It's not of interest to HN because the only thing you can sell related to Tiny Tiny RSS is a server to run it on, and the server game is for chumps.

No, it's because running things on a server is expensive.

I pay £10/year for my VPS, I think I spend more on domains. There are many cheap boxes[1] available out there for exactly this kind of purpose.

[1]: http://www.lowendbox.com/

Yes, but my time is much, much more expensive. I can't spend hours installing and configuring that stuff, especially when exporting my feeds is easy and fast.

Installing and configuring is time-consuming, but it doesn't have to be.

A teenager can set up and run a minecraft server in 10 min. Calibre and Plex have built-in servers on my home machine to serve ebooks and movies.

Running your own RSS reader server could be as simple as opening an app on your home machine.

I'm pretty happy with http://www.feedly.com/ so far. No brainer to import my feeds from reader, and pretty nice presentation. I'm actually happy now that I was forced into switching.

My biggest pain point was replacing Google Listen (on android for listening to my podcasts). Subscribing to a new podcast was as easy as adding a new feed to reader under the 'Listen Subscriptions' folder.

But I've replaced Listen with Pocket Casts and I'm happy with it so far. For more info, see http://www.vamonossoftware.com/2013/03/living-without-google...

I really liked their iphone/ipad apps. I have to agree that I'm actually happy this happened - this way, Feedly and the other services can compete without being overshadowed by Reader.

Google Listen is Very Limit Podcast Player. After i Discovery beyondpod, i never use Lister aging.

http://www.beyondpod.com/Android/

Beyondpod sync with Google Reader too. And i will miss this function.

Yeah, Listen was discontinued in 2012 so it wasn't ever going to improve - but it did the job for me for long enough. Pocket Casts has 2 features I missed in Listen : variable speed playback and sleep timer.

I've started using http://selfoss.aditu.de/. It is written in php with a mysql or sqlite database. It works great and with some tweaks from vince(https://github.com/vincebusam/selfoss) it works even better.

The article makes mentions mobile clients, but could anyone here give a slightly more mobile-centric review of the alternatives? Since I've gotten a Nexus 7, I've found myself using the Google Reader Android app rather than the web app, and I view Android app quality as one of the biggest factors in selecting a replacement service.

The first alternative I tried was Newsblur. I like their web version, although it's been unresponsive occasionally due to the influx of users. However, their official Android app has left me unsatisfied. In about 5 minutes of playing with it, I got duplicate articles, then a negative unread count, then a crash. I'm willing to give it more time to iron out the bugs, but in the meantime, what other alternatives (if any) have really solid Android apps?

The people behind Press, the best Google Reader app on Android, are apparently working on finding another place to host its content, but they have no webapp for now. Feedly has a good Android app and webapp, but it's more of a Flipboard type of interface than a Google Reader interface.

I've gone with Newsblur; hopefully they'll work a bit on the Android app, but for now it's the one with the best feature set.

I tried Feedly after posting that, and I don't like the minimalist styling of both the web app and the Android app. I could probably get used to it, but I think I'm happier with Newsblur for the moment. I'll keep an eye on Press's plans, they seem like they could be a good alternative depending on which way they choose to go to handle the Reader shutdown. Thanks for the info.

Can someone point out the features I've been missing all along by using a Desktop RSS reader? Is it just synchronization or is there something else to it?

It's mostly about the synchronisation. For my use-case, I read articles in Google Reader during my lunch break at work. When I'm browsing at home later, on my own PC or iPad I don't want to have to wade through dozens of articles I've already read to find the new stuff.

I guess there's also the convenience of access to the web app pretty much anywhere, but that's secondary (to me).

1. local memory consumption. 2. synchronization between multiple computers.

I am testing quiet-rss. I also tested RSSOwl. In fact I used to use Firefox's Brief a long while ago and I used it for extended period of time. None of these comes close to Google Reader for above mentioned issues. GR just works.

Aside from synchronization between multiple devices there's also Google Reader's enormous cache of old articles. The RSS feeds themselves usually keep only a dozen or so of their latest entries while GR usually presents the entire history. Sadly, I don't think any replacement will be able to duplicate that.

I don't care about reader as a reader. I care about it because it manages my rss subscriptions for several apps I use daily. Podcasts, pulse, ifttt. They all integrate with reader. Typography,shmypography. pick a client.

This is the reason they are shutting it down. How do you monetize something when the user never sees your content. I understand that, but it doesn't mean the internet didn't just get worse.

I decided to go with Liferea desktop RSS reader and I like it so far.

Can anyone point to a full-fledged review of The Old Reader?

I could only find first impressions by googling around for a bit.

I've been using it for a few days, but I can only comment on how they present the feeds, since I don't use the social features at all. It's pretty decent, there is no frills and pretty straightforward. If you want an RSS reader with a simple interface, and doesn't impose anything on you, this should be suitable for you.

But, there are two huge things that are a turn-off for me. First, I can't set the default homepage to be where all my subscription feeds' items are aggregated. So you will be left with the dashboard page when you open The Old Reader. Second, the feeds' items are not sorted in the order they were created or posted by default, but what irks me is I can't find any options so that it will be sorted according to the dates. I don't know if both of these things are something they will fix or add in the future, so I'm still jumping back and forth between this and Feedly. If they are not planning to address both of those caveats in the future, and Feedly delivers their promise on the seamless migration when Google Reader dies. Then I'll probably opt for Feedly.

There is an arrow icon for sorting.

I've tried the arrow icon, and I already tried the "Posts Order" option on settings, but my feeds' items are still not ordered according to the dates. So unless I'm missing something...

Here is an image to shed some more clarity on what I really meant. http://i.imgur.com/1Zb18cc.jpg

Well, as I mentioned below, they are extremely slow at the moment and they are not even fetching all the feeds on time. I gave them HN's feed yesterday and when I logged in this morning, they were showing me feeds from 10 hours ago. My local RSS aggregater was providing me real-time updates. So perhaps that's where the problem is? I am not sure. As far as I am concerned, if they cannot handle couple of feeds on time, than I don't know how they're going to handle 500 plus feeds that I have.

You use it and you know. I gave them my Google credentials yesterday, I uploaded my OPML as well. The website is extremely slow (which is understood). The OPML is waiting in the queue somewhere. I dropped few RSS feeds to test. Site runs slow.

I logged in this morning, saw HN news from 10 hours ago sitting at the top. I have decided to move on.

I am simultaneously testing local RSS feed reader as well (quiet-rss). Notwithstanding the syncing problem between multiple computers, it at least gives me the very latest news.

For those who don't use or need Reader's social features, could you please add an option to disable read permission on our entire Google contact list when signing up for The Old Reader?

Its high time to try the new Visually rich RSS reader http://goo.gl/r861h .

Visually rich is precisely what I don't want from an RSS reader. Looking at that feed, my eyes bounce all over the place trying to parse the content I'm interested in - the headlines. I'd rather have a vertical, textual list that I can quickly scan. It's boring, but that's the nature of the medium.

This is one of the reasons I've never tried Pulse, but at least that lines the content up for easier scanning.

People of Google Reader are typically not into Pinterest type feed readers.

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