when google reader died I just sadly switched to a different RSS reader and kept using RSS but my understanding is that for a lot of people Google Reader was special & hard to replace.
What was special about it? (the search? design? archiving? that it was free? social features? something else?)
What was special about it? (the search? design? archiving? that it was free? social features? something else?)
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For instance, substack has feeds for every blog at
Used it a lot but did not feel sad when it died because I felt design was dated. also people did not accept there were alternatives, and did not give other ones a chance.
Today there are awesome readers like Unread, ReadKit, Reeder etc.
So I think of Reader’s death as less of *the* singular event that “killed” blogs but rather as an “epochal event” that heralded the end of an era.
But now it seems some sites don’t keep an RSS feed.
a whole lot of people were on Google Reader, used it habitually. that happened because it was well done, and RSS was the main game in town.
when G killed Reader, fine alternatives emerged. but now Twitter was there, easy. for most ppl rebuilding a feedreader was too much trouble.
It was free (huge thing), simple to use, and provided an API that allow building apps on top of it
There are alternatives nowadays. But I think the value of Google Reeder resides in its simplicity
1) It was free.
2) It was ubiquitous and easy to introduce people to.
3) It had a very clean, very easy to use UI.
The last point was the big one for me, I struggled for years to find a suitable replacement (currently I host my own instance of fressRSS https://www.freshrss.org/
Also the fact that it was cross platform. My rss reader prior to it was stuck in a single browser on a single machine. It created stress to find something new that when I hadn’t been looking to switch. I also think it took a few months before what I chose was up to par.
I liked the compact design. Easy to scan for interesting news.
To be honest, NetNewsWire still feels that way to me, but it took years to get back in the habit and piece together the feeds that mattered to me.
Hmm…
I didn't read all 4 bajillion articles that showed up in my Google reader, but it was nice to have. I miss that, I miss a lot of things I spent time on that got shut down.
I used Feedly for a while but stopped long ago.
What do you use? I’m feeling motivated to get back in :)
I think this is a tech thing though.
This is part of the post I'm writing on my thoughts re Christine Lemmer-Webber's very good blogpost about Bluesky not being decentralized.
Open protocols will have their revival. Folks are tired of this company pattern IMO
I truly think that indie sites/blogs/feeds could make a comeback but it cannot be on a foundation of bloated software (WP).
(obviously blogging is not all about making money, but as someone with a Weird Internet Career it's something I think about)
I used to volunteer at my old high school and we talked about this; one hypothesis was that developers google stuff more than the average person, so we naturally discover new blogs all the time.
i'd say the commercialization helped kill it through enshittification, it definitely made me less interested in writing-for-my-own-sake
I’m firmly of the opinion that *Google Reader* killed RSS. Without it, RSS might’ve survived the emergence of social media.
Setting up an RSS Reader now is way more difficult, both technically and conceptually
Definitely finding a feed reader service that you like is not always easy though.
Near as I can tell it works pretty much like the Google one did, at least the way I used it. Hardly anything to it.
I also have a reader app that requires having an RSS service, so there's two parts to it.
I also wonder if the world of mobile makes it a lot harder - copy and paste is ROUGH compared to desktop
I started using it in middle school, and it died right when I started high school. I subscribed to all of my favorite webcomics…
During that era I felt like the internet was more authentic - it felt easy to find personal websites, blogs, forums, etc.
When Reader died I felt like we lost that authenticity. Of course all of that is still there but
Honestly, maybe the reason why I never went back to other RSS readers was because I’ve been trying to use it
Long live Google Reader! I know it’s mostly nostalgia for me, but I’ll never get over its death.
1) Keep traffic on my LAN (and avoid dependence on another operator's infrastructure)
2) Have more control over my services
3) Not get caught by bizarre UI changes
4) Avoid fees for quality products
Was a big fan of Feedly before they blocked my ability to do some cyber things in it b/c they made a multi-thousand $ offering for the same things I was doing.
- Fast
- Had a page where you could view traffic rates by source to help direct firehoses
Worst thing might have just been rapidity and vibes of closure.
Day-of, I don't even think many fully free comparable fully-hosted alts existed. (If I recall proper)
I remember switching to Opera rss.
Google reader being web based, so you can login from anywhere and be in sync, felt like its main draw. Its design was always pretty ropey imo.
I too never stopped rss-ing.
Still use RSS everyday
So it's definitely a loss of... Creativity, in what you can do in terms of what a feed reader can be.
It's nostalgia for tech optimism.
you can just add metadata to actual web pages.
an aggregator will likely need to parse embedded data on web pages either way, in order to aggregate sites with no RSS feed - which is probably most sites now.
what is the benefit of a dedicated format for this?
it never felt right, maybe it was just pure habit and the refusal to get used to something new.
now searching for a tui rss reader, but to no avail: nothing sticks anymore.
i.e., it is more like canceling a community favorite TV series.
One thing others haven't mentioned is that you could use it for podcasts too, allowing you to listen both on desktop machines and on mobile
I use Net News Wire wire now and it's annoying by comparison. I loved Feed Wrangler but it got lost to the bit cemetery.
The best was the combo of google reader and google home page. I had a landing page when I opened my browser that was like my own custom newspaper.