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Poll: RIP Google Reader. Which RSS solution do you use nowadays?

39 points by Samuel_Michon ↗ HN
On July 2, Google Reader shut down. I’m a heavy RSS user and I’m quite satisfied with the alternative I found, but I’m always on the lookout for better products. If you used RSS before, what did you do to replace Google Reader?

66 comments

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anonyfox
[Other] I rolled my own Client for personal use.
Samuel_Michon
Did you share it online (Github, etc)? I’d love to take a look at it.
anonyfox
Not yet, since i am planning to rewrite it from scratch. My first (current) implementation taught my how to use backbone.js, bootstrap, coffeescript and node-webkit to crank out a crossplatform desktop application.

Now that i learned how that stuff works under the hood (my main reason to roll my own client), i am planning to build everything in a sane manner an then release it.

Samuel_Michon
Alright, if or when you do release, could you let me know? My contact info is in my profile.
Ycros
[Other] Bazqux - https://bazqux.com/
acemarke
I continue to be amazed that Bazqux has gotten little to no press recognition. The UI is clean, simple, and an excellent match for the Google Reader UI, and it offers several different list view options (of which headline list is the only one _I_ need, but at least the options are there for those who are so interested. There's an API, and it's picking up some device app support (I use News+ on Android).

The one potential downside is the need to pay a subscription fee after 30 days, but given my heavy dependency on RSS, and what happened to the free Google Reader, $10-$30 a year is a trivial and well-deserved expense.

xeno42
I tried a lot of different readers prior to and after the reader shutdown, and Bazqux was the only one I found I could live with.

Very fast, has search, is consistently up, keeps the familiar UI and has no problem with my 1,000 item/day habit.

Worth the small expense.

StavrosK
I grudgingly use Feedly. I don't like it (too much mystery meat navigation), but it's good enough.
simcop2387
Even though you might have to host it yourself (or email me, i can setup a temporary account on mine for you to test with), I've found I like TinyTiny RSS's UI. It doesn't try to get in my way with my reading, and replicates the way that I had been using google reader with liferea fairly well. I don't have any complaints about it (other than it loading a little slow sometimes).
StavrosK
Ah, I'll install it on my home server and give it a shot, thank you very much for the recommendation.
joshavant
Netvibes! I've used Netvibes for many years and love it. I'm honestly quite surprised it's not more popular in the hacker community. It's quite tweakable and flexible.

One major drawback: They still have no native mobile apps and a pretty poor mobile web offering.

martian
You should add Feedspot and Goread. Both are reasonably faithful clones of the original.

Goread has the advantage of also being open-source, in Go, so you can install your own on Google App Engine. https://github.com/mjibson/goread

surfearth
After trying out a few of the alternatives pre- and post-shutdown, I ended up subscribing to Feed Wrangler mainly because it integrated well with reeder on my iphone. I also liked the fact that the website isn't overdesigned or confusing, although the two features it sorely needs are (i) sorting preferences and (ii) the ability to open tabs in the background in chrome (I had a chrome extension that did this for google reader).
smithzvk
I use Feedly, but I really dislike it. I, almost overnight, transitioned from reading blogs for most of my content, to using HackerNews and Reddit for most reading. I might check my Feedly account once every week or two as opposed to multiple times a day with Reader. The things I liked about Reader, that it was minimal but what it did (find RSS feeds given a URL, catalogue what I have read, fetch new posts, and be reasonable on a mobile device) it did very well, are just not present in Feedly.
twotwotwo
Feedly right now--the Android UI is solid, and I kind of think other apps should adopt the "card stack" pattern.

But goread tempts me, and I particularly like how the look and keyboard shortcuts are very no-nonsense and Reader-y.

neovive
Agree with the Android UI. After working with it a few times, I find it quite intuitive.
uptown
Feedly - and I read less RSS than ever. It's been a relief, as I used to treat Reeder as another inbox that needed clearing.
Artistry121
A relevant side note: is there any good way to get RSS feeds on a Kindle Paperwhite?
gjm11
Other: Rawdog (http://offog.org/code/rawdog/). Very bare-bones: you edit a textual config file and run it periodically from cron, and it gives you a (repeatedly updated) static HTML page with the contents of your feeds merged into chronological order. It doesn't live in the cloud; if you run rawdog on a server at home that isn't visible from the outside (as I do), then you have no way to read your aggregated feeds when you're away from home.

But it's simple, it works, and (with a tiny bit of CSS and Javascript tweakery in its templates) it presents things in exactly the way I want them, which no other RSS-reading tool I've seen does. (One page with everything inline, rather than a list of feeds that I have to select one by one: I want my feed aggregator to actually aggregate my feeds. This enables the simplest possible reading process[1]: start at the top and read or skim until reaching something you've seen already, then stop. The only nontrivial change I've made is adding little toggles to collapse and expand whole feeds or individual entries.)

[1] I should in good conscience admit that this breaks down in the presence of feeds whose timestamps are b0rked, which are unfortunately not that rare. This doesn't in practice require a big deviation from the simple process in the previous paragraph.

And I like having it live on my local server, not in the cloud. What feeds I choose to read are no business of, say, Google's, and the whole cloud thing is overrated. Get off my lawn!

ramidarigaz
This is exactly what I've been looking for. I almost got to the point of building something like it for myself.
cel
[Other] TT-RSS. I'm open to alternatives because the UI is very clunky, but I like that it is self-hosted and that I can sync my tt-rss installation with a feed reader app on Linux (Liferea) and iOS (Reeder via Fever API emulation, and tiny Reader)
hoov
Newsblur, and I hate it. I'll be canceling my account soon; I can't believe how slow it is.
ambirex
I've been using is since the shut down and I've been pretty happy with it.

What do you find slow?

aravenel
Strange--I have been using Newsblur since GReader closed, and am impressed at how fast it is. There were a couple of brief periods when it was sluggish, but he's done a good job of clearing bottlenecks as they have come up.

FWIW, I have about 400 feeds and about 1000 articles a day, so I am using it fairly hard.

boon
Gotta jump in here and agree with the other sub-commenters — it's generally very responsive. I mean, it has its once-in-a-while hiccups just like every other service out there, but overall, very very happy with it.
35pr17
Guys I can see alot of people use feedly but with complaints - if you want something better then original greader have a look on inoreader - seriously, I'm using it and I wouldn't switch back to greader from it.
ilSignorCarlo
I'm using Inoreader too and I'm quite happy with it. I would like to give a try also to Yoleoreader, but right now it just can import the feed list from Google Reader and it's not good for me
wellecks
[Other] feedlier (http://www.feedlier.com) A simple & clean way to aggregate feeds. It's a side project, so I'd appreciate any feedback on the site as well!