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After careful consideration of various options (which also included doing nothing, or investing heavily in updating the code), we've decided to go ahead and remove builtin feed support from Firefox. This metabug covers both the removal and creating public documentation for users (e.g. on support.mozilla.org ) of alternatives.

I believe they've decided it is easier to remove a feature that is not used heavily versus maintaining it. You could certainly offer to maintain it yourself. Or you could use one of the many, many alternatives for RSS. Personally I don't need my web browser to be my RSS reader. I also like to be able to use RSS from multiple locations, which is why I use TinyTiny-RSS which I access via my web browser using the web interface, an iOS application on my mobile device as well as via the command line using newsbeuter, all of which shares the same TinyTiny-RSS database, so reading it on any device shows it read on any other.

I've also heard good things about FreshRSS and there are lots of other desktop clients.

I think lots of people here have some server running somewhere. Install Tiny Tiny RSS (TT-RSS) on there, and be able to access it from anywhere. Totally open source. https://tt-rss.org/

What's great is that there are a number of RSS reading apps that you can point to your server, so it doesn't matter whether you're on mobile or on your desktop browser. For Android, I'd suggest just use the app from the same author. For iOS, I use Tiny Reader (App Store link).

I'm an avid user of RSS feeds. When Google Reader bit the dust I moved to TinyTiny RSS along with many others. It's based on the look and feel of the old Google Reader. I login to TinyTiny every morning to catch up on everything from software updates to the latest news. In one app I have access to: The latest news from various sources News from all the open source projects I follow Updates on topics I'm interested in. For example, I have an RSS feed based on Google News keywords such as SIP or VoIP. That way whenever a story publishes with those keywords it's brought to my attention. Product updates. I follow the RSS feeds of various companies for changes and updates to products I own. I have key worlds set in TinyTiny that group together lists of articles that contain key words regardless of source. RSS is a huge time saver. It sure beats visiting 100+ sites daily to get the latest news and updates. https://tt-rss.org/

I still get most of my news via RSS. I started with Google Reader in 2005 and have been hooked on RSS since. Once they shut it down I switched to Tiny Tiny RSS which is an open source RSS reader that you can host yourself. It even has plugin for "Google Reader Shortcuts" using j, k, v, etc.

I use TinyTinyRSS https://tt-rss.org/ . I have it setup on a small shared hosting plan I have with a Let's Encrypt SSL for security. I have a cron job that runs and checks for git updates and processing them updating it to the latest rolling release, as well as running every 5-10 minutes to check for new feeds. They have an AMAZING mobile app that even has offline support. Very handy when I was on a 5-hour flight the other day to download all feeds and stories and read later on the plane. If you have a shared hosting account available to you, this is the way. It has options for logins, even multiple users. The app will save your user/password if you'd like. This is also how I came and found this article. I used Feedly in the past but found TTS much easier to use and did not rely on ANY 3rd party services. After being burned by Google Reader, I felt this was a must.

Here's what I use:

Tiny Tiny RSS on my home server (but you don't have to use it that way): https://tt-rss.org/

gReader on Android: https://play.google.com/store/...

Tiny Tiny RSS: https://tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/...

Check out tt-rss. It even looks like Google Reader and ships with a plugin to support Google Reader shortcut keys!

I recommend Tiny Tiny RSS if you're willing to run something yourself. Works great, simple requirements (I think I'm actually using sqlite for it) and even supports Google Reader shortcut keys. There's a great iOS app as well as Android options.

If you don't have your own webserver somewhere or don't want to manage it, I totally get it, Feedly is great, too. Just wanted to offer up another option.

Where are you seeing that?

I don't see anything like that on my system

I don't think they show up in the RSS feed either. I pretty much never go to /.'s homepage anymore. ttrss grabs the summary for me, and if it's interesting, I'll click through. It and Full-Text RSS have also been useful for some sites with broken layout that won't show up properly in desktop browsers anymore (National Review, I'm looking at you).

My main problem with this is it's a Google sub-project, and as much as I love their core products, they do have a habit of pulling things as soon as you become dependant on them (reader, AppInventor, and health for three examples I did depend on until they vanished). OK any company can pull a product, but it seems to be a favourite Google pass time.

Fortunately your poor investment in something simply because it cost you nothing doesn't stop others from using the results of projects like this to test their assumptions on the subject - or build upon the knowledge gained from the outcomes.

Google Reader alternatives:-

• Go Read subscription required
• Selffos
• Tiny Tiny RSS

AppInventor alternatives:-

• MIT App Inventor
• iBuild App

"Health" alternatives? WTF do you mean - maybe you could do your own research? Likely it'd take less time and effort than whining because you depended on something free (cost, contribution, and commitment wise).

I remember when the annual Melbourne show meant free show bags full of goodies - there was lollies, and icecreams, and chocolate bars, t-shirts, and hats. Streets Icecreams, Cadbury... all utter bastards. Now I have to pay money for junk food! [mutter, mutter, whine, piss on furniture, whine].

Exactly. When Google Reader was shut down, I switched to Tiny Tiny RSS. I didn't want to just go to some other system that I didn't control and that would end up being changed or closed in a couple years. Now I have a system that works, and I don't have to worry about someone else shutting it down. As long as I can find a hosting service with Apache and PHP, it will work for me.

I loved Google Reader. All other 3rd party solutions like Feedly, etc, all just don't work the same. What I ended up doing was setting up my own instance of Tiny Tiny RSS on my shared web host I already had. Has a great Android client app, works for me. http://tt-rss.org/

And when I've read my feeds, there's always the TTRSS forum to cheer me up:

http://tt-rss.org/forum/viewfo...

They do not suffer fools gladly!

While some might run away in horror at the mention of the name AOL Reader, which has been around for a while now.. is pretty great.

It was recently updated and the ad bar was removed, the software is much quicker and with the fact it is not an independent business project like Feedly, or Inoreader.. there is no upselling!

I tried feedly, it was pushing the upsell too hard and the product didn't feel very useful in its 'free' state... ( https://feedly.com/ )

I tried Inoreader and its free product was much better than the feedly one, but its interface felt slow and clunky compared to what I wanted ( http://www.inoreader.com/ )

I tried DIGG Reader but it was so minimal and featureless that I barely went a week of using it before moving on ( http://digg.com/reader )

I also used TinyTinyRSS locally for a good 6 months and while it is quite good, and the only data I'm revealing to others is that i fetched their feed..maintaining the thing is something of a pain that never comes up with other places. ( http://tt-rss.org/redmine/proj... )

As of right now I am back to using AOL Reader as my main RSS feed reader... It is fast, the design is good enough for me.. no upselling ...the feature set is just enough to allow me to do what I did on google reader, and not overload.. and they seem to be actively working on making it better ( https://reader.aol.com/ )

GReader shutting down is what lead me to try out Tiny Tiny RSS.

If you are already running a webserver for something else, it is pretty easy to set up your own personal RSS reader.

I never really trust companies with my daily needs. The dependency is stressful and unpractical, so I try to avoid it whenever possible.

For feeds I use Tiny Tiny RSS these days, hosted on a VPS with some other daily stuff (mail, calendar, notes). The application is a lot slicker than the website would suggest. I highly recommend it.

Since RSS seems to take a back seat in modern web development (FOLLOW US ON TWITTER!), I also do some screen scraping in PHP to create my own feeds for sites that don't (properly) support it.

Switched to Tiny Tiny RSS. Hosting it on a shared hosting (Dreamhost) which I was paying for anyway. It works great, and its nice having a solution that won't just disappear one day. Sure my web host could disappear, but I could always switch to another one.

set up Tiny-Tiny RSS on your own home server

And lose home Internet for 12 months if discovered.

Their official party line is that they don't support shared hosting

I don't see how that's sustainable with the IPv4 address shortage. I was under the impression that each VPS needed its own IP address, and servers on an IPv6 network still need to be accessible by clients stuck on IPv4-only ISPs.

I highly recommend setting up the free tt-rss service. There's also a nice mobile client.

Or, you could just forgo cloud services all together and set up Tiny-Tiny RSS on your own home server or shared hosting account. I find it works great. Web interface is a little slow, but I mostly use it from my phone anyway. Their official party line is that they don't support shared hosting, but I didn't have any problems getting it to work.

I'm still perplexed by the fact that they cancelled Reader. It had been around for 8 years. I'm sure it wasn't their most popular service, but then again, there probably didn't cost them much to run. The code didn't really need updating as nothing has changed in RSS in the past 5 years, and less users just means fewer server resources to handle the traffic. After they announced they were closing, 3 million people joined Feedly. That's not a very small number of people by any means. Personally, I went to Tiny-Tiny RSS, which I host on my own (shared host) server. That way I'm not reliant on some company deciding to shut down service.

Just go with TT-RSS and host your RSS aggregator yourself if you have the skill/hardware. The Old Reader will still need to find a business model. Feedly announced their cash grab earlier today. The lunch will not be free anyway in the long run.

If you don't want to host it yourself, go with one of the up-front honest for-pay services. "No cost, hosting for free!" obviously means "no reliability" in this new era of online feed aggregators.

You forgot tt-rss!

I'm tired of getting bounced around (greader, theoldreader) so I'm just going to run TinyTiny RSS on a dedicated box myself.

I ended up choosing TT-RSS as well, for one specific reason: you can add the Fever plugin and continue using Reeder on iOS. Sadly, the OS X and iPad versions of Reeder are not functional right now, but it works great on my iPhone.

A second, less critical but still useful feature, is the Google Starred import plugin. This makes TT-RSS one of the only feed readers that can maintain your list of starred items.

Plus, while I didn't mind paying someone to manage the server (I really don't need another thing to run), the fact that I both control the application and can modify it as I choose was hard to beat.

I ended up choosing TT-RSS as well, for one specific reason: you can add the Fever plugin and continue using Reeder on iOS. Sadly, the OS X and iPad versions of Reeder are not functional right now, but it works great on my iPhone.

A second, less critical but still useful feature, is the Google Starred import plugin. This makes TT-RSS one of the only feed readers that can maintain your list of starred items.

Plus, while I didn't mind paying someone to manage the server (I really don't need another thing to run), the fact that I both control the application and can modify it as I choose was hard to beat.

Kind of irrelevant, but my solution is to host my own install of tt-rss: http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki It's similar to reader, and works great.

I use tt-rss. It runs on my web server so i't always on, has mobile interfaces, runs in any browser. Try it.

http://tt-rss.org/

It's probably too much work to disentangle it from internal services and API's they don't want to expose. But there is tt-rss if you want an open-source replacement (but you'll need your own server to run it.)

> This is why I am writing my own simple reader.

Aah... you too? :-)

And if anyone has their own host and wants something full-featured right now, look no further than Tiny Tiny RSS which, despite the name, is not all that tiny. If you use PHP and want to start rolling your own, I recommend starting with MagpieRSS.

Why not? TinyTinyRSS has native mobile apps, including an official Android client.

Host it yourself: http://tt-rss.org/

Tiny Tiny RSS has filters, but there's also Yahoo! Pipes, which works with every reader.

If you don't mind self-hosting, try Tiny Tiny RSS, it's a barebones reader with just that kind of UI.

You forgot the "dot-org" at the end of your url: http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki/FrequentlyAskedQuestions

You forgot the "dot-org" at the end of your url: http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki/FrequentlyAskedQuestions

Self-hosting solutions are available, will never get canned in this manner, and are highly customizable. But, of course, require a place to host it.

I've tried both Tiny Tiny RSS and RSSLounge before in an attempt to rid myself of the Google Reader addiction, but found them both lacking in some respects every time. Since Google Reader is disappearing though, I made a new attempt this morning.

RSSLounge seems to have been abandoned a year or two ago, but perhaps it was stable enough (RSS aggregation is not nuclear science).

Tiny Tiny RSS have some in my eyes quite horrible default settings, especially coming from Google Reader. The good news, however, is that it is configurable to mimic Google Reader quite closely. With some work with custom CSS rules it is quite close at a first glance.

My Tiny Tiny RSS configuration:

• Enable "Automatically expand articles in combined mode"
• Enable "Combined feed display"
• Long date format: "Y-m-d H:i"
• Short date format: "Y-m-d H:i"
• My custom RSS

Last time I installed it on Debian I ran into enough caveats that it led me to write a guide for others to install it, but since then it has been included in the unstable repository. To install it, some manual work was still needed, though:

• sudo aptitude install tt-rss libphp-simplepie #the second package is a correct dependency now, bug fixed very recently, so that should no longer be needed.
• sudo vi /usr/share/tt-rss/www/config.php #Enter server URL. I also set SINGLE_USER_MODE=true per preference.
• ln -s ../conf-available/50-tt-rss.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d #A bit weird by the Debian package to not put it directly in conf.d/
• sudo vi tt-rss.local #This was for my local configuration. Needed a entry for Apache to give access to a directory outside of DocumentRoot. I also locked it to localhost access per preference.
• sudo service apache2 reload
• sudo vi /etc/default/tt-rss #Set DISABLED=0 to be able to start the service.
• sudo service tt-rss start #Hopefully the aggregator will start fetching feeds.

Then go to http://localhost/tt-rss and start configuring. All subscriptions can be exported from Google Reader and imported in Tiny Tiny RSS, keeping dirctory structure intact.

I'll try to migrate fully to this solution now that Google apparently no longer wants my traffic :-) . I'd say I probably use Reader the most of all Google's services, including Search, Gmail, Youtube, etc., so the decision to can it is quite strange from my personal view.

So Google, you're shutting down Google Reader? Yeah, well... I'm gonna go build my own Web-Based RSS Reader with blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the RSS Reader! I have been a avid Google Reader user for 3-4+ years. I check it every break at work and usually first thing in the morning on my Tablet and at night before I go to bed. Love it. After hearing this, EVERY other web based RSS / Reader site was slammed and down. Then I thought... what if any of those services just randomly *poof* overnight went offline, like Google Reader, but without notice? Having my own shared server, I looked into PHP / MySQL solutions. So far Tiny Tiny RSS Reader Wins out. http://tt-rss.org/ Set up and running in 20 minutes. Being a shared server I couldn't run daemons so I had to use a cron job to have it update the feeds every 10 minutes but it works great so far for the last 12 hours.

Which alternatives do people like?

I've been using Tiny TIny RSS for a while now and it does everything that I used to use Google reader for except you can host it yourself.

Tiny Tiny RSS is an open source aggregator that you can host yourself and offers an API and has two android clients (don't know about iphone). I use it and think it is a worthy replacement for google reader.

I will also explore self-hosted solutions. I started using Google Reader so that I could read the same fees from multiple computers without losing the "read" marks. I guess a self-hosted solution will be just as useful.

TT RSS looks interesting, I will try it out first, unless someone suggest something else.

If you want an open source, host-it-yourself web-app then there's Tiny Tiny RSS, as recommended by a co-worker.

The site's been up and down all day for some completely inexplicable reason, but the brief glimpse I got of the live demo was pretty impressive. I escaped Google Reader nearly a year ago (the Google Plus 'integration' had been annoying me, and in a fit of pique I got rid of all Google dependencies I had) and while I've been mostly happy with the desktop-app Vienna RSS for Mac OS X, further alternatives are always welcome. I imagine someone will get an open cross-client sync working now that Google Reader is going away...

When Bloglines first annouced the shutdown I looked for a good replacment (didn't like Google Reader) and found an open source solution. I installed Tiny Tiny RSS on a shared hosting account and it's as good as Bloglines, better, actually because the uptime is greater. http://tt-rss.org/redmine/

I had the same story, until Google started asking for my mobile phone number as verification to link to my Google account. IMO, this is over the edge, as in this country you have to use your real identity to get a mobile number.

Then, I switched to a self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS and never looked back. I don't use Google accounts anymore, and don't have cookies or javascript enabled for any of Google's websites.

Except search and maps, I self host everything (email, websites, Jabber, RSS reader, calendar, etc.) on a dedicated server. There's a small price to pay, but as an example, I have the same email address for the last 10 years. I have all my emails for the last 10 years. There's no worry about privacy. As a programmer, it's useful to run irssi from it under screen, host my own websites, pretty much run anything network oriented..