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by ims 4528 days ago
After Google Reader shut down, I briefly switched to feedly but found the UI basically unusable.

Newsblur is a great alternative. The web client and Android clients are both nice to use -- no experience with iOS but I'm sure it's comparable -- and are open source, written and maintained by Samuel Clay (conesus on HN).

I pay for the service but there's a free tier as well.
2 comments
pronik 4528 days ago
Just a small notice: NewsBlur is actively hostile to power users.

1. There is a hard limit on a number of unreads per feed, which is pretty low (100-500 depending on a feed): https://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/topics/feed_cut_off_aft...

2. When not hitting that first limitation, Items are marked as read after 30 (previously 14) days: https://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/topics/do_unread_items_...

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slgeorge 4527 days ago
I think it's a bit strong saying it's "actively hostile" to power users. The developer takes a very specific view about why he has the limits set-up that way: I think a lot of people would like a different level but he makes sense over the fact that most people don't go that far back on RSS. And in fairness he's added a lot of other power user features like keyboard shortcuts.

Personally, I really like Newsblur. It's available on all the clients I care about, it's pretty fast and it's Open Source with a sane business model. I'd really like it to have search as that's the main thing that stops me finding good trends in my RSS feeds.

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PhasmaFelis 4527 days ago
Is there a news reader that will preserve unread items forever? I like to collect months' worth of my favorite webcomics to read at one go, and I know the old Google Reader at least would just delete them after a while.
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_delirium 4527 days ago
Fwiw, these are the current limits: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/feb398a2d4821d84...
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pavel_lishin 4528 days ago
Newsblur's Android app can tend to get buggy - as you're scrolling through items by swiping right-to-left, sometimes it'll end up on a blank item, and the whole feed will be marked as read. It also sometimes shows some count X for a given folder, but will show less than X items.

On the upside, Samuel seems to be very quick to respond to issues, and pushes updates out pretty often, both to the app and to the site.

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