Comment by yanw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yanw | Hacker News Reader

"RSS industry"?!

I thought the whole point of RSS is that it's decentralized. Feeds don't have to come from a single source and no one client is needed to view them.

One could argue that the demise of Reader is the best thing to happen to RSS in along time as this supposedly decentralized and decentralizing standard became too reliant on one vendor.

Is it really Google's fault that RSS was overshadowed by the emergence of social networks to the point that it doesn't make economic sense for them to keep maintaining it?! I don't’ think so. Neither is it a commentary on standards, it’s merely a company that is acting in its own perceived interests, something companies are wont to do.

As for the “Industry” part, last I checked those who are actually building a Reader replacement are delighted with opportunity:

http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/23/an-awesome-skin-list-view-...

http://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-sc...

http://blog.digg.com/post/45355701332/were-building-a-reader

When a writer this associated with Microsoft starts framing this situation as yet another flimsy accusation of anti-competitive behaviour, I tend to be skeptic.

"One could argue that the demise of Reader is the best thing to happen to RSS in along time as this supposedly decentralized and decentralizing standard became too reliant on one vendor"

I'm overjoyed that yet another for-profit corporation is out of this segment of the internet market. If it gets some former Google Reader users move to client-based, open source RSS readers, that makes for less spying on users and more privacy; and the more decentralized the net gets, the better.

I can't wait to get back to the times where I had to poll all my feeds every few minutes and saturate my bandwidth.

Saturate your bandwidth by polling RSS feeds? What do you use to connect to the Internet, a 300 baud modem?

Every few minutes?

I don't really want to download another client. I want it to be in the browser.

Then you want someone else to pull and deliver feeds, which means it costs someone else. Plus hosting, and site development. You can't do that in FOSS for long.

Problem I have is even though akregator does the client side job well, I have multiple devices I read feeds on, and want them synced. But I don't want to leave my main desktop on 24/7 as a feed host, and I have abysmal bandwidth anyway (50 KBps up) so accessing it over dyndns from anywhere is unreasonable.

I really do need a service, online, that maintains my feeds updating and viewing, so I can sync them across devices. Problem is everyone I've looked at either doesn't provide a mobile client (and I've become way too used to google reader's flick right to next article for webcomic reading) or has some stupid browser plugin like feedly that breaks webpages for me. They also provide way too much of the social nonsense - I just want a web sync of feeds and views, plus some favorites feature.

Production is decentralized, but consumption doesn't have to be. You need to store your reading list somewhere, and once you have more than one device, you need some place where this information comes together. That's Reader.

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