And any hands for Google Reader? I don't think any other tool has had that level of impact on my content consumption, prior or since. It was everything it needed to be and not anything more. RIP.
Then I went thru and tried all the competitors, new and old.
Quickly a few rose over what GR ever was and of them I settled with Inoreader - been a happy, paying customer ever since.
GR was holding down the evolution of feed readers by keeping theirs free. That was what, 5 million users not paying anybody for the service? When it was gone, things started moving forward again, fast. So actually, it's good that they closed GR.
Reeder on Mac and iOS is good, been using it for years. You used to need a third party service like Feedly to sync across devices but the latest version has iCloud syncing which is pretty handy.
I never used Google Reader, but did use other RSS, and I stopped years ago - not because RSS doesn't still work great, it does. But because so much of the content I used to consume with it is gone now. I used to follow a few dozen blogs that got updated regularly, and had RSS feeds. Now almost all those blogs are dead, migrated to Substack or Twitter, or post so infrequently that it's not worth a subscription.
A decade ago, the web browser felt like an endless source of amazing content, and an RSS feed was a great way to keep track of a lot of it at once. Today, I feel like there's still great content, but it's in Twitter feeds and newsletters, and my browser is for accessing webapps and storefronts. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong content or just don't know where to go to find the good stuff anymore, but somehow the end of Google Reader was prophetic, and whether that was a self-fulfilling prophecy or not is up to each of us to decide.
