State of Feedreaders

[p-eh]

It was great meeting you (@s3ththompson ) in NYC a few months back. And as we chatted after you presentation I promised to share some of my learnings as I've been testing different tools. Finally found some idle time on a flight, so here's some initial thoughts about the other tools out there.

Feedbin

The layout and reading experience in feedburger is better than any other service on this list. But if you tent to follow more visual feeds over text based ones, viewing items one by one becomes quite a chore after a while. I was a happy subscriber for a year or so. Once I decided to include all my interests into my reader (tumblr, instagram, vimeo, youtube, etc.) it just couldn't handle it in a flexible way.

Pros

• UI experience is polished.
• Good typographic layout for longer articles.
• Great content extractor for feeds that don't include the whole article. And the setting value is remembered at a feed level.

Cons

• A single view type to view items through.

MINIFLUX

This one is an interesting open source project because of the creators persistence for simplicity and privacy. It's focused on text/blog content. The RSS part works well and does nice things like loading embedded media like youtube links through private proxies. But it lacks any alternative views like grids for more visual content.

Pros

• Focused feature set
• Privacy sentric approach
• Self hostable
• Open Source

Cons

• Limited feature set

Inoreader

this is one of the more advanced readers out there. Handles most feeds types like a champ, and a lot of them. I've had thousands of tumblrs in a folder and it just works. And what's great about Inoreader is how you can set a view type (magazine, feed, gallery, etc) per group of feeds. For example seeing gallery grid for tumblr follows and a more typical text feed for kottke.org, etc. Inoreader is the closest thing I've found to a true funnel for the Internet. The UI, typography and overall aesthetic isn't really that elevated. But Inoreader's customizability makes it a very versatile tool for power users.

Pros

• Flexbile front-end with multiple views per feed group
• Can Handle a large number of feeds
• Filters, highlights and other pro features to help you weed out the noise from the feeds.

Cons

• Sub-bar typography
• No real reader view