[throwawayG9]

I guess this comes up kind of in response to the google thing. Honestly I don't know why people keep using anything from google. About two years ago I decided I would never use a google product again, and I never looked back.

For RSS, I have been using Liferea since then, and I totally recommend it.

[jsnell]

RSS is a good example of an area where having an application be backed by a service brings huge value to a lot of people. If you want to access your feeds from multiple different machines, synchronization becomes awkward with a purely local app. It gets even more awkward if you want to do it from multiple different platforms.

You could use some commercial non-Google service as the backend instead, but those could equally well get cancelled. You could maybe host your own service and have full control, but the installation and maintenance is a huge time sink. And in both cases the amount of applications you could choose from is likely going to be smaller than with Reader.

There can also be other benefits in sharing the service with other people. For Reader, the infinite feed history was a biggie for me. It really was quite amazing to subscribe to a 4-year old podcast, and have easy access to all the 200 podcasts from that period even if the current feed only showed the 10 latest ones.

(I used Liferea for a while maybe 10 years ago, and even contributed some code at the time. But ultimately even the web-based RSS readers of 2005 had a better workflow than a local RSS reader. Sure, the UI sucked and you were completely at the service provider's mercy. But at least it was possible to access your feeds both from work and from home.)

[omaranto]

Liferea is worse than useless for me, it's downright dangerous: I procrastinate enough as it is, I don't want an RSS reader than I can only use when I'm at my computer and most probably should be working! RSS readers go on the tablet or phone to check in my spare time.

[sc0rb]

"Honestly [sic] I don't know why people keep using anything from google"

Because gmail is one of the best email services around?

[gtt]

not by a large margin, imho. Both zoho and yandex are decent, and fastmail is superb (but paid).

[isaacpei]

yes, Liferea is awesome. is it possible to port it to a web platform? meaning to make it online?

[reidrac]

Liferea supports Tiny Tiny RSS sync, so that could be it. You can host http://tt-rss.org/ and use Liferea as desktop app (and may be the web interface for mobile).

In fact that's the only part that I really liked of Google Reader: it was the perfect backend (I got used to the web interface, but the real experience was with the native apps).

It would be nice to have a "standard" API for RSS sync that could be implemented by servers and clients. In that way we could host our own RSS backend in the same way we run a SMTP and IMAP servers to have our own independent email infrastructure.

Tiny Tiny RSS API could be a good start, or we can agree on a Google Reader compatible API.

[simcop2387]

I've used liferea with google reader for some time to keep things synced between computers and devices. I really hope some of those projects to keep that API alive bear fruit just for that. Though I have seen liferea become non-responsive when having 1000-2000 feeds to check (like other places, i just add stuff and never delete, because there's too many to sort through...)