Ask HN: Have you settled on a Google Reader replacement? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you settled on a Google Reader replacement?

38 pointsmwexler87 comments

Feedly keeps popping up as a winner; some love Newsblur, some say The Old Reader or Tiny RSS. Just asking: have you settled on a winner? What were pros and cons? Do you read on both desktop and mobile, and did that play into your choice?

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Basically I am waiting for the Reeder App Guy to Announce what he will do with the app. If he goes the "give me an google api compliant endpoint and it will connect to it", I might use https://github.com/swanson/stringer , looks really promising so far. But I need Reeder to support it first.

Just pushed some basic Reeder support to Stringer last night :)

Ah, great! Thanks for this !

Reeder is going to use Feedbin. See: http://reederapp.com/reader/

That is not the only option he added. But a final info from him how he sees reeder in the future would be great.

Right. I read that, and in hindsight should have used more inclusive wording. Anyway, I really like Feedbin even though it could use a bit more polish (a couple of animations would go a long way e.g. when it is loading an article).

I have been using Feedly for a bit and my analysis:

PROS

- Great UI. Layout similar to a Magazine

- Intelligent sorting of content - Must Reads etc.

CONS

- No offline reading on Android app

- No pure HTML client like Google Reader

- Feedly Chrome Extension eats up RAM and slows down my laptop. Uninstalled.

CONCLUSION: Still looking for a better alternative

yeah feedly seems to sort of fill the gap for me as well for same reasons.

I switched to Feedly. I browse only on my Android phone, and I find the app works very well. I like that they're reimplementing the Reader backend, which means I don't have to worry about keeping track of my feeds when I get a new phone or install a new version of Android. I also like their communication with users.

Have you tried multiplx.com?

The only reason I use RSS, is for offline reading. Which is why I can't use feedly, as much as I'd like to :(

Yeah, Feedly developers, if you are reading this. Don't inject an image into every page I visit. Uninstalled.

I've gone with Newsblur now.

I have been working on building my own(FeedRebel.com) for the past few weeks. It's far from perfect at the moment and web only. I plan on doing a Show HN at some point but would love some early feedback as well. Here is the url http://www.feedrebel.com

I'm using https://feedbin.me/. The design is really good and has Reeder support (which is handy because I have both Mac and iPhone clients)

Blogtrottr (http://blogtrottr.com/) is an RSS to e-mail service. Combined with filtering, good old procmail for me, it makes a nice alternative to Google Reader since it automatically works on mobile as well.

I really don't need all the social 'features' that come with other RSS services.

rss2email is a good way of running your own rss to email service. I only say this because rss to email services have a nasty habit of shutting down.

Newsblur: it has a clean UI, mobile apps, open source, has a viable business model and has gotten past the first round of scaling to handle the Reader diaspora.

A number of the people I used to follow on Reader have joined and the social side is flourishing with most of the voices which Google+ snuffed out.

I like the idea of it, but this is disheartening:

> There are 1192 people in front of you, all patiently waiting on their free accounts on NewsBlur. By going premium you can get full and immediate access to NewsBlur.

I get that they're trying to be able to handle the load, but it concerns me that they can't simply 'scale' their service like most modern web applications.

On the contrary, I'm happy with that. I'd rather they try to be profitable from the beginning than do the whole get users then figure out monetization model. I want a stable long term rss reader, not a service that tries to get acquired.

I've never heard about any web application that can just "scale" without some growing pains. Sure it's possible to pay for some elastic IAAS or PAAS, but that really does not solve any scaling problems. You still use as much resources per user. To increase the effectivity of the application, one has to either grow it over time or built right from the start. To get it right from the start can be a huge sub-optimization if you miss something and must do it over anyways. That is why most start "quick and dirty".

That's a selling point for me: there's an actual business model which can pay for the cost of operations. Very few modern web applications scale instantly and automatically, particularly not those which are a) non-trivial and b) run by small startups. I prefer the service staying zippy rather than getting overloaded and turning off a bunch of people.

As far as I know, it's just one guy at NewsBlur.

I've ended up replacing Google Reader with Twitter.

I follow all the people I care to read about -- they tweet their blog postings as they're posted. I follow Techmeme -- they tweet their river of news. I aggressively unfollow or disable retweets for any followed account with a poor signal/noise ratio.

I supplement that with an occasional glance at Google Plus (where the Android/Google-centric like to post updates). If I'm really behind, I just visit http://techmeme.com/river and catch up.

I've slowly started to replace my RSS feeds with Twitter. Everything I see in my feeds is generally posted to Twitter as well.

I'm using CommaFeed[1], it's pretty much a simple Google Reader-like interface. It's a bit slow sometimes during heavy loads and needs better scaling.

The code is open source and available at Github[2].

1: https://www.commafeed.com

2: https://github.com/Athou/commafeed

I am trying with feedly, but on Android:

* no offline support

* no way to not use the built-in browser for opening links

* no way to go from a post to all posts from this source

And on the review pages they stuff a lot of high-star reviews with the same text such as:

> Since the announcement of Google Reader being discontinued, I have enjoyed this easy app. It also has a simple, attractive interface. Highly recommend.

and:

> Feedly has managed to create a visually appealing RSS reader, that also focusus on a clean simple visual style that is intuitive to use.

It's really weird.

Newsblur: it does everything I want, and I've been impressed with the improvements to the system of late.

Here's a list of replacements with some additional information such as their popularity, recent blog posts etc. https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader

If there are any missing, please submit them via the "Submit App" link in the footer.

Literally just started using The Old Reader (https://theoldreader.com) and it's the one whose interface I like best so far. No integration with third party apps, but it's free, and their website is great on mobile anyway.

Hello, we recently hosted a hackathon and it spat up an open source, no-bullshit Google Reader Alternative. It is live at http://reader.pykih.com.

We started this as a fun project and we only have an early prototype out but are getting sign-ups. We want it to be a simple, text-heavy, less UI, developer friendly, hacker news style reader.

Please do try it and give suggestions, feedback, bugs, etc. at https://github.com/pykih/reader/issues. In case you are a Rails developer and wish to contribute, we are at https://github.com/pykih/reader. Thank you in advance. :-)

Using http://www.newsbeuter.org/, a terminal-based RSS reader. "The Mutt of RSS Feed Readers", as they call it.

Everything in lists, next-next-next and hit 'O' to actually open an item. Rip through all those feeds fast.

I use Tiny Tiny RSS and it works well enough with the web interface on my desktop. Although it's self hosted I have no problem using a $2.5 per month vps with 256 mb of ram to host it. For mobile access I use YATTRSSC which is a decent tt-rss client.

Also use TT-RSS as I need to check from behind a restrictive proxy.

I like TT-RSS. It has that mark-read-on-scroll thing as well as next/previous article by arrow keys (or k/j) thing. Awesome sauce.

I was never a GReader user (I've always prefered my hacked up self hosted rnews aggregator; http://rnews.sourceforge.net/ ).

However I have been hunting for a decent rss reader for android ever since flipboard made changes which have resulted in exactly 1 line of text being displayed for each item.

Just today I found Holo Reader.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.hdodenhof.h...

Super simple, good layout, deals with my hacked up yahoo pipes feeds (where I've jammed header img tags into each description). I'm very impressed by it.

I wrote and host my own rss to email gateway, which I'm pretty happy with so far. Of course at the time the google reader shutdown was announced I hadn't been using rss for years so I started from scratch, feed-collection wise.

FeedHQ — I just subscribed last night ;-)

I've trialed various other services and FeedHQ.org is my favorite. (See my recent comment history for more detail on other services I've tried.) It's fast in both UI and checking feeds, and I like the multi-page design instead of the more common 2 or 3-column Reader-like layouts. Most importantly, this means than when reading an article I don't lose more vertical screen real estate to navigation bars.

Accounts are $12/year, so the service should stick around, but the code's on Github[1] in case it doesn't.

[1]: https://github.com/feedhq/feedhq/

No winner yet, but cut the list down to 3.

Feedly: PRO: imports GR including which posts you already read. PRO: GR imported posts contains all history (even from blog feeds that are now defunct) CON: slows down browser considerably CON: UI has too much whitespace CON: UI is slow (browsing with j/k takes ages)

CommaFeed & InoReader & OldReader PRO: uses as much screen estate as possible PRO: very fast UI CON: GR import misses the read/unread markers CON: GR import incomplete (so now defunct feeds do not appear)

One of the reasons I want to have the defunct feeds, is that it contains the old blog of a friend that passed away.

Thanks for asking because it reminded me to cross this migration off my ToDo list.

Before checking this I was convinced I would be going with NewsBlur. Based on the positive feedback on Feedly I decided to check that out.

For me Feedly wins hands down. Winning points:

- instant Google Reader import (wow!)

- list view is very similar to the plain GR view

- social rank for URLs based on G+ and FB (I have been looking for a PostRank replacement ever since Google killed my second favorite app)

What I would love to see in future enhancements:

- extend social rank to filter the views (more like Postrank)

- search within posts that I have read

I'm working on a serverless chrome extension rss reader. It's still in development but if you'd like to try it out or help out, please have a look: https://github.com/nissimk/brassReader.

Check out the code. Go in chrome to extensions page set developer mode on load unpacked extension point it at the checked out folder

If you're logged in to google in another tab, press the button with the cloud on it and it will pull in all of your feeds.

Thanks for the look.

Yes, Feedly. I tried it out when Google announced the shutdown, and I wasn't completely satisfied, but then 2 or 3 weeks after that I started using it more and it felt a lot better. I don't know exactly what changes they made, or if they made any at all, but the experience feels fairly polished now. I like to think that they worked on the feedback the Google Reader refugees gave them. I'm quite happy with it, and I've stopped using Reader completely.

Decided to go the self hosted route and host my own tiny tiny rss reader. as its more or less the same and im in control of when it goes down, plus with mobile client

Anybody know of a decent reader that allows me to click and go to the comments of sites like HN?

Most of the times I first read the comments before actually going to the main link.

Yes, this is exactly the problem I had with feedly when I tried it a few weeks back. Seems to have way more clicks required to read the comments than Reader's much leaner interface.

I hacked up my own in March. I didn't even know Google Reader was closing. I just got tired of the features that other readers didn't have. It's a console application, which I realize has limited utility for most people, but it is very powerful and provides many multi-tool functions that could be useful to someone.

http://github.com/gmn/rsstool

There are screen shots and some instructions on the wiki.

We're re-releasing Nuesbyte today, personally I think its amazing alternative. :)

http://nuesbyte.com

Its a clean, simple, fast, html reader, more info:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5750405

I'm still searching for a perfect substitute. Feedly is the best I've found so far. I've very pleased with the desktop experience. Although, I really liked the Google Reader widget for Android and the Feedly one isn't as dense information wise, and reading offline (when on the subway) has proved to be problematic.

I wrote my own replacement, which is open source here: https://github.com/sirsean/quickfeed

I host it for myself, and it works quite well; no mobile app or mobile-optimized site at the moment, but for the desktop it'll do.

I didn't like any of the existing post-Reader options.

I found the Feedly Firefox plugin to slow down Firefox a lot, so that wasn't really a good experience.

So far, as a FeedDemon on Windows, Reeder on OS X and Reader on Android user, NewsBlur looks like the best option from where I sit (as a 10-year RSS reader user with some 120 feeds ATM). Going to try Feedbin, though.

I set-up TTRSS (http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki) on my own server. I didn't like that Feedly requires a browser add-on, as I'm not always going to be able to install that on every browser I might use.

I'm fairly happy with Gnus combined with Gwene, and surprisingly found this combination more time-efficient than Google Read has been for me. I first reduce my read list using Usenet-reader paradigms, and then use a small function of mine which batch-opens all that remains in Chrome tabs.

I used to use Google Reader as a podcast repository for listening to podcasts on Android (at the beginning with Google Listen then, after Google retired it, with BeyondPod/Podkicker). Is any of these services integrated with a mobile Android podcast reader?

Using Feedly, two main issues:

  No direct link to more items from source
  Android app limits my subscription list which is well over a hundred sources.

Everything else seems to work and the extension works fine on Chromebook.

https://github.com/wking/rss2email

Pros: It sends to my Gmail account, separated by labels, and I can read both in PC and mobile.

Cons: you have to run the command in your PC.

I just started with commafeed.com The good is that it's simple, looks like google reader, and had a 1-click import from google reader.

The bad is that it seems slow to update and it's almost unusable on the iPhone.

Most of my feeds does not get updated and seems to be slow. So, i am going with multiplx.com and pretty happy with it.

I'm not one of these Reeder users. I've always used Byline on iPhone (a Google Reader client) so I'm waiting to see if this is going to be maintained post-GReader and what service it will support.

I've been keeping track of all the options (about 100 so far and counting) and updating my blog post about it here: http://bit.ly/RSSreaders

Try MultiPLX at http://multiplx.com - is totally web based, a pure HTML5 client, supports card layouts and also let's you export your own data.

Using my own BazQux Reader https://bazqux.com

PROS

- fast

- clean UI

- shows comments

- integration with Readability to get full article text

- many view modes

- able to subscribe to twitter/fb/g+

CONS

- non free (PROS for some people)

- no mobile app yet, but I'm close to finish cloning Google Reader API.

Trying https://www.commafeed.com/ at the moment, but still open to suggestions.

this broke on me multiple times.

NewsBlur.

http://getgini.com/google-reader-alternatives

I'm using TT-RSS. I just installed it in a subdirectory of my existing domain account - so no incremental cost at all.

Using Bazqux.com. It's the closest to Google Reader that I've found and it's fast. Inoreader.com is also not bad.

I am going with multiplx.com as it gives me a google reader style and a Visually rich pinterest style UI.

I used http://selfoss.aditu.de/ and I like it

Thanks for that. I've been looking. It runs nicely on my Raspberry Pi. Took me about an hour to set up, mostly because I made a stupid mistake. Fixed that, runs like a hose, and surprisingly lovely to look at. Win.

I'm using http://theoldreader.com/

I'm also using theooldreader, but find that updates are sometimes slow and it seems to miss some stuff, so I've been using an install of tinytinyrss as well

tried to keep away from google starting some months ago (prior to google reader shutdown), and i tried some cli softwares on linux, Newsbeuter is amazing. http://newsbeuter.org/

Tiny Tiny RSS; hosting it myself, and I love it. I read on both mobile and desktop.

Using Feedly for the past couple of weeks. Good so far and the UI is neat.

Ask Google to open source it. Go to this thread and add +1 and your name.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5761892

I've been using Feedly (desktop and mobile) and quite like the experience

Feedly here, both on desktop and mobile. Luv it!

Using feedly, find it a decent alternative.

gwene.org, then read in gnus via nntp.

no :(

one mention of 'export,' none of 'opml' in the comments

Google Currents

Feedbin.

FeedBin.

But keeping an open mind. Looking for better changes and sync/2rd party support from FeedHQ, NewsBlur and TheOldReader etc. Feedly is not my thing. It's a funny service. No sync to third party client. You need a Firefox client to read on its website. Means it spies in you.

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