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Ask HN: Which feed reader do you recommend trying?

12 points by tomjonesmi ↗ HN
Feedly was having issues so it started me looking for alternatives. Then, I saw some news about Minimal Reader and their free accounts and I'm interested in trying it but was wondering:

What feed reader do you recommend trying?

Is it even necessary to have a feed service if you have a native app instead?

* Edit: Feedly is no longer down, so I modified the title/question.

18 comments

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greenyoda
I've been happy with NewsBlur.com for the last year. I have a premium subscription ($24/year) that gives me unlimited feeds. I think you can get a free account with up to 64 feeds. They support web, iOS and Android (although I've only ever used the web version).
tomjonesmi
Newsblur looks interesting. Thanks!
jsherer
You should give all of the free services a try to see what you like. Do you subscribe to a lot of feeds?

Disclaimer: I run https://minimalreader.com

tomjonesmi
50 or so. Many of those are old that I could get rid of.
akkartik
My eccentric self-hosting no-server-needed homebrew open-source solution since google reader died: http://github.com/akkartik/spew. Since I suck at UI, it has none. Instead it just leverages firefox UI for everything.
tomjonesmi
Do you have any screenshots of it in action? Does it work cross-platform?
akkartik
I haven't tried it on anything but ubuntu. Since it's firefox SDK I would hope it's cross-platform. Only anecdotal experience I heard was troubles with debian's iceweasel.

I considered screenshots but it's hard to show anything cool since it's all vanilla firefox UI. Here's an attempt: http://imgur.com/a/kT3NN. Is it helpful?

Semiapies
Feedbin: https://feedbin.com

There's a small fee, but it's been absolutely worth every penny. The guy's been able to upgrade servers with demand and spend time on improving the interface (particularly for mobile). There are also third-party apps compatible with it, but I haven't found any of them to be as good as the mobile web interface.

It hasn't been perfect (there've been occasional glitches, mostly involving UI slowness), but problems get corrected quickly and the app has continually improved since I signed up, shortly after Reader died. I've been overwhelmingly delighted with it.

As for app vs. service, I've found services useful for keeping everything painlessly synched across devices and computers. It would depend on your feed-reading habits.

mdturnerphys
The Old Reader: http://theoldreader.com/

I've been using it since Google Reader shut down and happily signed up for the premium account (allows for over 100 feeds, among other benefits) when they started imposing a limit on the number of feeds.

sdfjkl
Same here, this is closest to the good old Google Reader experience, with no bullshit added.
OWaz
I host my own Fever[1] service on nearlyfreespeech.net. Fever has a UI to access feeds and some apps, like Reeder on iOS, can pull from Fever accounts. I've had my Fever service running a few weeks before Google announced Reader was going away. I haven't had any problems with Fever.It costs me a total of $2 to $1 per month to host. Setting it up was very easy and the instructions are very detailed.

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

ereckers
I'd stick with Feedly, and I have. They experienced a DDOS. It happens.