DEV Community

Discussion on: Monocle Reader - The Feedly alternative.

Collapse
 
itsasine profile image
ItsASine (Kayla)

You had me at dark mode <3 I'm still not over Google Reader being shelved, tbh.

Collapse
 
tmartty profile image
tmartty

I sadly didn't live the Google Reader Era.. what do you miss the most? Why was it so good?
And, which reader are you using now, may I ask?

Collapse
 
itsasine profile image
ItsASine (Kayla)

Most people tend to miss Google Reader for the more community aspect of it, though the Wikipedia page has a solid list of its features and a picture of what it looked like. I try Feedly every couple years but it never feels right, which I know is totally not helpful to go off of. I used Reader for desktop viewing of RSS feeds that updated throughout the day and discovery of new, similar feeds.

Probably what annoys me is that the world of RSS died down with Reader. I can't get authed feeds of, say, my dev.to homepage. Just the main page which has a billion new articles per day and ain't nobody got time for that. Or sites outright removed their RSS feeds to get more clickthroughs on their main site with ads. I also used to follow a lot of webcomics that only updated weekly or biweekly, but those either killed their feeds or only included the header in the feed rather than the comic itself. The internet's just different nowadays :(

I'm going to poke around monocle this weekend when I have time and see if it scratches that itch Feedly never could, but since it'll be starting back up an old routine, I don't know how much I'll stick with it.

Thread Thread
 
tmartty profile image
tmartty

I get it, yeah, RSS is not seen that much nowadays, for which I want to, in the long run, create a 'Feed maker' which would serve feeds from any website (something like fetchrss.com/).

My main goal here is to save time when wanting to be up to date with the web, so you don't have to open a whole bunch of sites but just go into Monocle, check out the headlines, read those that you found interesting or save them for later (another feature i'll be working on) and just stop wasting time endleslly scrolling sites for new content.

I'll look into the wikipedia page of Google's Reader, thanks for sharing that!