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Goodbye, Feedly

erikgahner.dk

11–20 of 201 posts

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#11

NetNewsWire user here. It’s very good. Would love one running on Linux natively.

Seconded, it would be lovely to have cross platform. Simple and just works without fuss. Now, if only more websites would have RSS feeds these days.. it's been a steady decline.

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#12
Going through the article I realized this attitude is what eventually kills some really good software. If a software does what you expect it to do and does it well but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing purposes...is that really so bad?

Live and let live, I say. Not everyone is running a charity and Feedly is nowhere even near the top of the list of software ripping off their users or selling their data to make money.

What the author labels as "cluttered" is really not that cluttered at all. It looks much better than an completely empty list in the alternative they prefer. But that's just UI.

I am not saying don't move to another alternative. I am just saying that the reasons the author is calling Feedly out for are unjustified and don't really make sense.

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#13
This writer is really entitled. It is a free tier for a service that costs money to host and maintain. Of course there are upgrade prompts.

I use Feedly (free) as a hosting service, and Reeder or one of the other many great RSS client apps as the frontend to it, so I don’t have to see the feedly interface.But the Feedly API I use constantly and it is extremely solid.

That’s part of the greatness of RSS services. If the service’s UI bothers you, you don’t have to use it.

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#14

I dont understqnd this attitude. I use feedly and like the author of tfa I don't pay them any money, so I ignore the junk. This is the price you have to pay when you get something for free. I have a lot of sympathy for feedly: it seems like a really hard thing to get people to pay for. What does the author think feedly should do with its free tier? Before feedly I self hosted TinyTinyRss for a while (kind of slow) an…

> I ignore the junk. This is the price you have to pay when you get something for free.

clearly it isn’t, or the author wouldn’t have been able to move to a free alternative without any junk to ignore.

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#15

https://theoldreader.com/ is still the best thing after Google Reader.

I rarely ever pay for services on the web. But I will pay for theoldreader. My mind is getting foggy with age, but I think it does everything that Google Reader did, and not much more. The perfect drop-in replacement.

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#16
I left Feedly for the same reason a while ago. I think there is a trend of "editorialization" of all kinds of apps that tries to sell new features and "experiences" to users instead of focusing on the core ideas, which I find really annoying. Plus the Feedly UI itself is annoying and doesn't give me a simple mailbox-like view like normal RSS readers.

The solution I went with is native RSS readers (like the author), but backed by an Open Reader server (The Old Reader in my case, but there are others) for syncing between devices. On the Mac, Vienna as a client is quite nice.

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#17
post #13

This writer is really entitled. It is a free tier for a service that costs money to host and maintain. Of course there are upgrade prompts. I use Feedly (free) as a hosting service, and Reeder or one of the other many great RSS client apps as the frontend to it, so I don’t have to see the feedly interface.But the Feedly API I use constantly and it is extremely solid. That’s part of the greatness of RSS services. If t…

I think that is a bit unfair. Many of us have used something that was originally a certain way and worked and we have let it get embedded and useful at which point it becomes more and more complicated, maybe the upgrade prompts become much more prominent and we feel let down by something that doesn't actually solve the problem any more.

I don't know Feedly's history and whether it was originally Open Source or not but plenty of people decide their popular FOSS tool could be paid-for, at which point it is common to disenfranchise the people who made it popular in the first-place.

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#18
> I started using it because of its simplicity and minimalism.

That is so weird to me. I tried pretty much everything there was back then (eventually settled on Newsblur only to switch to self-hosted TT-RSS after they raised prices when I already barely got any use out of their features) and Feedly always seemed like one of the most bloated/featureful (pick your choice here :D) options there was.

Re: Goodbye, Feedly

#19
post #5

I'm torn between the love of Free Stuff and the understanding that even Free Stuff costs money.

It's not even a choice between free and not-free, sometimes you would be happy to pay but then the tool becomes bloatware. As the OP said, why do you need two vertical menus for an RSS reader? Why not hide the advanced stuff under an advanced menu or allow customising what is and isn't visible?

Plenty of apps/sites become popular on a strong core USP which people want and then add a tonne of cruft as they pretend they are adding value, when in many cases it is just noise that only a few people want/use but everyone else has to suffer the UX changes along the way.

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