Tell me more about this Pi cloud. I’ve wanted to set something like that up - ideally with docker and portainer to manage the containers on all the Pis - but the physical setup always gets me. I’m at a loss on how to make it both convenient and not messy.
“there wasn’t anything sophisticated, robust and well-maintained to switch to”
No, there were several: Bazqux, The Old Reader, Newsblur, etc. They weren’t nearly as rich as GR but that is to be forgiven considering they were all shoestring operations.
I think the more interesting part of this story isn’t that Google killed RSS but that this may have been what killed the open web. Many of us think that people migrated from feed readers to social networks, now they are there they don’t leave.
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RSS feed pages are the solution to sometimes otherwise script bloated pages and confusing timelines. I always look for the simplest RSS page. No fancy appearances for me, thanks. I just want the content.
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I still use Feedly for a dozen or so RSS feeds that are still active and focus on subjects I’m interested in. I don’t see any reason to attach to one of those spam fire hydrants.
Same here, grandfathered in but I can’t add new feeds.
Ah, but Reader would have competed with, uh, whatever Google’s “social” app was called.
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third vote for newsblur. I dicked around setting up my own hosted reader, but keep using newsblur.
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The REAL death of RSS was when Facebook removed the ability to suck RSS versions of pages and people. That completely broke a major RSS use case for me (i.e. I subscribed to FB pages of bands, restaurants and bars I liked and read a feed of that stuff when looking for things to do on a weekend, or checking out new singles/releases). After FB screwed people who’d invested in building commercial presence by forcing them to pay, that entire channel was dead.
I probably should see if I can’t recreate the use case with a zapier or something to pull twitter/snapchat/insta feeds from those same people in.
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It’s not really an actual cloud yet, just a growing number on Pis on my LAN. (I have a website and beta with Pi3s, and 2 Pi2s, 2Pi1 spares as I’ve upgraded.) They’re either on wifi or my old 8 port switch.
Some will be assigned functions, like a music/news/weather/assistant, or sensors, but they’ll all have spare cycles and it would be nice to throw tasks to “the cloud” rather than a specific Pi. I haven’t looked at that part.
Rather than a rack of Pis, I’m doing individual cases. They don’t have to be fancy, just solid enough that a tug on the network or power cable won’t send them flying.
Here’s a cube one that I’m about to do from a $2 wood crate (room in the back for battery, audio amp. Eventually a black foamcore panel in front.):
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Weird. I’m unpaid and have 200+ feeds… adding more all the time (maybe it discounts inactive/unreachable feeds?)
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it’s hard to believe it’s been 5 years.
after google killed reader, i tried the other services available at the time but i found their various restrictions and idiosyncrasies frustrating, so i went back to google.
i used an rss-to-email service to direct my feeds to a dedicated gmail account. reader and gmail had a lot in common UX-wise. the biggest difference that i’ve noticed (other than the colour scheme) is that while google reader would eventually get rid of unread items after they got too old, gmail doesn’t do that (so one of my labels has grown unmanageably large but i still find a way to make use of it). i still get labels, i still get google-powered search, there’s an inherent sharing capability (i can just forward, or i can reply with comments and select a new recipient). i have to use the rss-to-email service to manage my subscriptions, but adding/removing subscriptions isn’t something i do very often so it’s not a big deal.
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Feedly paywalled search? I’m freeloading and I can search.
I migrated from Digg Reader shortly before they shut it down and can’t complain. The iOS app is very nice, Digg never even updated theirs for the iPhone X screen.
Feedly lists ‘Power Search’ as one of the Pro features for $5/month.
On my free account, there’s a search box. when I try searching, I get what looks like results, but they grey out and recommend I upgrade for Power Search.
Also, feedly really turned me off when they injected ads into my streams on occasion. Ad at the top or bottom of my screen? Fine. IN my content? No.
Oh, ok. Yeah, searching your feeds is premium, but searching for sources and topics is not. I was using the latter.
Also, adblockers work well on Feedly. Still removes in-stream ads.
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I switched to Feedly under the hood, but use Reeder on Mac and iOS.
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Dang, just checked and I can add new feeds now…currently at 114 feeds. Things are looking up!
I had migrated to The Old Reader, but found I wasn’t using it as much for a few years. This wasn’t because of social networks, I’ve largely ignored those. I had just found a few favorite sites for news.
But the last couple years… I’ve rediscovered my RSS. “Oh look, BoingBoing is still a thing.”
So yes, RSS is important for an open web.
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Hooray! I, too, remain a defender of email!
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Yeah, Twitter dropped RSS as well. I use this Twitter-RSS-Parser with my self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS; it uses my (free) API key to retrieve tweets as JSON and republishes them as RSS. Unfortunately, the full contents of each tweet are not included so I have to read what’s there then decide if it’s promising enough to bother clicking through.
This also really highlights a problem with publishers dropping RSS and using tweeting to promote articles; it’s common for different pull quotes to be tweeted and linking to the same story multiple times. Even if their RSS contained only the headline and not even a teaser, it would be better. Of course, I’m reading tweets “the wrong way,” i.e. not in a form presented by Twitter itself.
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Sure, because the vast majority of RSS feeds remove the oldest content (podcasts are the exception, their feeds often include every episode). Tiny Tiny RSS has a feature to “star” items so they’ll always be retained (it also has it’s own customizations for purging items based on age).
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