Hacker News Reader

Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

> Blogs suffered from the inability to provide a good reading platform, which is why the death of Google Reader was so mourned.

It was mourned, but even then there were people saying it's a good thing. And they turned out to be right, we now have more and better RSS readers to choose from than ever before.

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Interesting, because my experience has been exactly the opposite. I used to read so many web articles via rss, but that's reduced month on month since the death of Google Reader. One of the main reasons is that I've found it hard to read on tablet, phone, laptop and desktop and know what I've read and what I haven't.

I'd really like to get back into reading RSS, but found it really difficult to manage.

What suggestion would you make for a good, free, cross-platform rss reader?

Sorry, don't really know about free. Back then I tried pretty much every solution there was, including the self hosted ones (which I assume are probably far better now then then), but stuck with NewsBlur.com which is not really usable for free (limited amount of feeds).

I suggest TinyTinyRSS[0] (ttrss), a good and free rss-reader. It's open-source, so you can host it yourself (a short tutorial is on my blog[1]). Since it's a web-application, you can run it on any device that has a browser, ttrss even has an offical android client[2].

There's even a hoster that provides ttrss as a service [3].

[0] https://tt-rss.org

[1] https://www.zufallsheld.de/2013/11/03/tiny-tiny-rss-centos-n...

[2] https://tt-rss.org/gitlab/fox/tt-rss-android

[3] https://tinytinyrss-servers.com/

I've been running it for years and heartily recommend it. Both the web and android clients are very robust. The killer feature for me is the ability to share arbitrary content to your own public feed provided by the ttrss instance. (https://tt-rss.org/gitlab/fox/tt-rss/wikis/ShareAnything)

I'd recommend using Postgres as opposed to Mysql, as that is what author specifically recommends (mysql support has been a bit subpar)

Another endorsement for ttrss. I've been running it since 2005, albeit I forked my version years ago after finding the original author a little abrasive to deal with re: patches.

Not free, sorry (although cheap), but as far as web-based alternatives go I recommend BazQux (bazqux.com). It's essentially like Google Reader, lets you auth with your Google account, and works with a bunch of RSS apps.

I was happy to pay for a lifetime account. It has a 30 day demo period if you want to check it out before deciding.

I found BazQux when Google Reader died, and have been thrilled with it ever since. It looks and feels much like GReader did, and it just _works_. I continue to be amazed that it's not more widely mentioned when these sorts of discussions pop up.

BazQux and Pinboard are two simple services that I am extremely happy to pay for, based on their usefulness, reliability, and value.

Bazqux is also great because it can fetch content from social media - Twitter, Google Plus, some Facebook, etc. Unfortunately, you can't just get your account's entire feed from it, but you can, for example, give it a Twitter page and get that page's tweets.

Oooh, I remember hearing about BazQux. IIRC, it's actually written in some really cool language, I think. I wanna say... Ur/Web + Haskell? They don't publicize it on their site or anything, which I love, since it's actually a real product that happens to be written with it, rather than an "RSS feed reader written in X".

Yes, correct, Ur/Web + Haskell. The author posted it in /r/haskell, IIRC.

I self host via a Tiny Tiny RSS install. It's got a good reader app for iOS (iPhone and iPad). It hasn't caused me any issues at all. I prefer it to NewsBlur too.

Agreed. The Android app is very good, too.

Feedly is is excellent.

I agree. The default UI is tailored to tablet-style formatting, but with a bit of configuration it is a very compact and efficient RSS reader.

https://www.inoreader.com/ is very much like Google Reader except better (e.g. detection of dead feeds)

Seconded! Inoreader is completely free to use (but there are reasonably priced upgrades if you want to support them), and offers web-based and app-based reading.

I tried several RSS readers after Google Reader closed, and Inoreader is the one I've stuck with.

Thirded. I use inoreader to track my billion or so webcomics, and I like it a lot --- enough that I actually gave them money.

rss2email

I use digg reader (yes, really). It works just like the google reader did.

http://digg.com/reader

I like https://digg.com/reader/ but it's not free/cross-platform but it's the closest to Google Reader I found.

If I had to pick up a client application I'd choose Feeddemon on Windows.

Try http://yoleoreader.com

I'm using QuiteRSS and I'm quite satisfied with it.

https://quiterss.org/

I would have preferred a browser plugin, but all plugins had a really bad user interface. So I tried RSS tools that are separate from the browser, and settled with QuiteRSS.

If you're OK with a web based reader, I've actually found Digg Reader to be pretty nice. I know, I know... it's Digg, but still... it's not bad.

Of the desktop client readers, I still favor RSSOwl, but if you have a LOT of feeds, then performance can be a bit of a drag.

if you don’t mind paying a token amount of cash for good software, Reeder for Mac and iOS is brilliant

Its not the platform that's the problem. Its that the content is not appearing on Blogs and in the feed. Its happening on Social Networks.

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