Back in the olden times, I was an avid user of Google Reader. I had dozens of RSS feeds and went through my feeds religiously. When Reader was killed I jumped to Feedly, and while it was alright for a while I just couldn’t get into it and eventually fell off and found Reddit.
Well, it’s been around a decade and I’m interested in jumping back into RSS. I’ve seen a lot of suggestions, but right now Reeder and News Explorer are the two I’m looking at. Ideally I’m looking for one that can at least sync between macOS, iPadOS, and iOS; but watchOS would be a an excellent bonus (and tvOS is ludicrous, but News Explorer supports it, so sure?).
Do you use an RSS reader anymore? What do you use or recommend, and why? I’d love to know.
Reeder with Feedly as the source on iOS, Feedly website on the Mac.
What is the advantage of Feedly as a source?
Thinking of getting rss setup again and have a lifetime Feedly account that goes unused.
Mainly just that it’s a web service so I can access it anywhere, but also has good client support for when you want to use an app. I like to use multiple platforms with everything in sync.
Ah. Ok so use it as a common source list regardless of app. Cool.
Was trying out Feedly for the first time in years. Felt a bit dated. Still does it’s job but would be interesting to see how Reeder or others do things.
NetNewsWire with Feedly
NetNewsWire with syncing through Feedly.
The Feedly web UI is decent, and NNW is great on Mac and iOS.
I use Feedly directly in the web UI primarily on Windows and Linux
It all stays in sync nicely.
I switched to Reeder with Feedly when Google Reader shut down and never looked back
NetNewsWire is free and light weight in a good way.
I like Lire on iOS. I use the subway and train a lot and lose service, so it filled the need of offline caching. I like it!
This doesn’t meet your platform requirements, but for non-Appley types reading - Feeder:
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/
Very minimal (in a good way) and clean RSS reader that can sync across Android devices. I think if it had a Web version it’d be perfect.
I’m between lire and inoreader; I have inoreader as the source, and I really like the design of lire. I might have a problem where I only see articles newer than a month old, but I read them enough that it’s not a big deal
Those are the only two readers I’ve tried and actively kept using; just my two cents :)
Probably belongs more in selfhosted, but I started to do my own instance of miniflux. Works decent and is clean interface. Didn’t want to have chance of another company ending a product again.
I have tried many and Reeder is my default rss reader on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Reeder 5
Agreed. Fed by my self hosted FreshRSS server.
I love this implementation. No charges, no random shut down, etc. basically free. Amazing. Glad I’m not the only one.
Definitely NetNewsWire (https://netnewswire.com/).
I stopped using Feedly after all the creepy AI stuff. Reeder synced over iCloud with an OPML export every now and then keeps it so I’m not reliant on a central service and can run it all locally should I choose.
Anyone using Feedly, or equivalent, hasn’t learnt the lessons of Google Reader. Manage it yourself, don’t rely on a central service that’s going to do creepy monitoring on you to power their AI model.
What AI stuff? I use freedly as a backend for Reeder so never touch the website. This might be the push I need to either go local or roll my own.
My slightly vague recollection was that they were basically feeding “enterprise customers” a load of information including stuff that could be used for union busting, monitoring protests etc. Their enterprise plan has
Feedly AI Advanced Skills: Market intelligence Threat intelligence Biopharma research Competitive intelligence
as features. So yeah, creepy as fuck. And they said at the time that this was all done using “AI”.
I use Inoreader and have been very happy with it
Ditto, switched to Inoreader when Google Reader closed and have never changed so it must be doing something right.
Thanks for the suggestions everyone! There were quite a few, and it took me a fair bit to decide on which one I wanted to start out with.
For now, I’ll be using Reeder to see if it meets my needs. Like I said though, lots of fantastic options. NetNewsWire was up there around number two in suggestions, and Feedly was mentioned a fair bit as well. Admittedly I also asked around people I know, and overall those using RSS seemed to prefer Reeder.
Still, if you’re stumbling upon this looking for your own, definitely go through the suggestions here.
