So you liked Feedly for almost 10 years, but never bothered to support them financially. And now you complain that they go the extra mile trying to earn money?
Goodbye, Feedly
81–90 of 201 posts
Re: Goodbye, Feedly
#82I pay for NewsBlur and have been doing so for years. It is an underappreciated, excellent, fully-featured, indie RSS feed reader with support for twitter and youtube etc. It can extract full text from feeds. It can both receive emails (newsletters) and send emails (when a feed updates). They have an excellent free tier.
I have tried every other competitor and no one comes close.
Re: Goodbye, Feedly
#83I 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…
>Why does feedly imagine I would want to pay £5/month to read rss feeds?
Microsoft and Adobe need massive scale to charge prices that low. They're each probably 10,000x-100,000x larger than Feedly in terms of end-user licenses.
For a service I find useful enough to choose over a free alternative, I'm happy to pay $5-30/month to fund development and maintenance. I don't want all my software coming from the Microsofts and Adobes of the world.
Re: Goodbye, Feedly
#84Reading through the article, Feedly might just have a classic, fast version without any new features and charge users for it.
And those who wants new fancy things can enjoy the fancy version. And I believe, there are many users who just want fast and simple software these days, and early version of feedly was a great example.
Re: Goodbye, Feedly
#85If you're looking for a cross-Apple-ecosystem reader, News Explorer provides MacOS, iOS, and iPadOS apps and uses iCloud to sync. No affiliation, just like using it. If you're only following feeds on MacOS, NetNewsWire is also great.
NetNewsWire has had an iOS version for a while now.
Re: Goodbye, Feedly
#86Going 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 d…
> is that really so bad?
In case of Feedly, yes. I feel like a hamster being tried to be converted. Feedly's free tier doesn't feel like free. It feels like a getaway drug which tries to make you pay for other features.
I have used for a week, then SDF announced availability of their TTRSS instance. As a paying member, I moved there. I am much more happier now.
TTRSS is free and open source. I'm just supporting SDF so they can continue to exist.
Re: Goodbye, Feedly
#87I find feedly works really great. I'm on the free tier, my UI is relatively uncluttered, they introduce new things from time to time, but mostly it's the same as when I first started when google reader shutdown.
I get this author doesn't like it, but it all seems a bit overly dramatic for a few feeds.
Re: Goodbye, Feedly
#88https://theoldreader.com/ is still the best thing after Google Reader.
Or if you want to self host: https://miniflux.app/
Re: Goodbye, Feedly
#89Going 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 d…
> 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?
As the article mentions, the problem generally isn't any one individual change - the concern is about the sense of direction for the overall project. The typical direction is from "simple software that helps people to achieve some goals" towards "product with features designed to increase revenue, data gathering, and stickiness" -- like the login-required anti-feature mentioned.
If those changes are gradual then users may not really notice the small differences as they introduced, and if anyone does complain, it becomes easy for supporters of the project to deflect complaints (as, arguably, you may be here -- not ostensibly trying to keep the author with the product, but trying to reduce their credibility and persuade others that there is no problem).
In many cases, free and open source software can help avoid a project falling into dark patterns because it's possible for people who disagree to fork it and maintain/promote their own alternative -- and then for other people to compare the original and the fork on their merits (which are transparent).
Re: Goodbye, Feedly
#90So you liked Feedly for almost 10 years, but never bothered to support them financially. And now you complain that they go the extra mile trying to earn money?
Exactly. It's so comical. You were never going to support them making their software, never going to upgrade, never going to provide any value to them in anyway even though they provided value to you for 10 years. Seems like this is a good thing for feedly.