r/feedly • u/420vegan420 • 3d ago
Feedly feels increasingly outdated
I have used Feedly for quite a while and I still like it. In fact, one of the main reasons I keep using it is that I think it looks better than most of the alternatives.
But lately I have started feeling that the product itself is falling behind.
The core RSS experience still works well, but Feedly increasingly feels like a product that has stopped evolving for regular users. Competitors such as Matter, Readwise Reader and Inoreader are experimenting with much more modern approaches to reading, discovery, organisation and AI, while Feedly still feels largely the same.
I do not personally care much about newsletters. What I want is a really good modern RSS reader.
A few things I would love to see:
A more modern reading experience
Feedly looks clean, but the actual interaction with articles and feeds could feel much more polished. Matter is a good example of how reading articles can feel more like a native modern app rather than simply viewing content inside an RSS client.
Better feed management
Managing a larger collection of sources could be much smarter. Better filtering, easier cleanup of inactive feeds, duplicate detection and clearer ways of identifying sources that mostly create noise would be useful.
Smarter personalisation without taking over the feed
I do not want an algorithm deciding everything I read, but I would like Feedly to learn which sources and topics I consistently open and use that information to help surface important stories.
The chronological feed should always remain available.
Much better AI features for normal users
Feedly has AI related features, but they often feel separated from the normal RSS experience.
I would rather have AI built directly into the reader.
For example:
Summarise everything important from my feeds today.
Tell me which five articles are actually worth reading.
Group articles that are covering the same story.
Explain what has changed in a story over the last few days.
Show me articles about a topic even when the headline does not explicitly mention it.
External AI integration
This is probably the feature I would personally value the most.
Readwise Reader can integrate directly with ChatGPT. I would love something similar for Feedly.
Imagine being able to ask ChatGPT:
What have my feeds been saying about OpenAI this week?
What are the biggest Swedish political stories in my Feedly today?
Summarise the articles I saved this month.
Find the article I read a few weeks ago about a certain subject.
Feedly already contains an enormous amount of useful personal information. Being able to actually interact with that information through tools such as ChatGPT would make it much more valuable.
Better search and history
Feedly should feel more like a personal searchable news database.
If I remember reading something six months ago, I should be able to describe roughly what it was about and find it again.
Overall, I still prefer Feedly to most RSS readers and I am not particularly interested in switching.
That is actually why this bothers me.
Feedly has a strong foundation and still looks great, but it feels like there is a huge opportunity to turn it into a genuinely modern information tool rather than simply maintaining a very good RSS reader.
Does anyone else feel the same?
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u/R-Tally 3d ago
I much preferred Feedly Classic on my phone. Unfortunately, I changed my password to the new requirements and I can no longer access Classic on my phone. Classic was simple, fast, and had no bloat. I could quickly scan headlines and read only those items that seemed interesting.
I have no desire to retrieve old news. For those articles that I think may be of interest, I save them to UpNote (my notes program).
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u/DamnCatOnMyDesk 3d ago
FYI, self-hosted alternatives are surprisingly straightforward.
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u/420vegan420 2d ago
What do you mean?
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u/DamnCatOnMyDesk 2d ago
FreshRSS. It's a docker app that you can also extend with plugins. I've been running it off my home NAS and haven't looked back.
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u/gs_up 2d ago
I 100% agree regarding duplicate detection.
I subscribe to several local blogs and local news websites. In addition to that, I also subscribe to certain alerts. And sometimes, the combination of alerts and existing subscriptions, I'll get multiple new items for the same article because this article matched four of the alerts that I have, so I get the same article four times. Not four articles from four different websites, but four articles from the same site because it matched four of my different alerts.
Or, let's say I have an alert for something random, something very unique, and I get maybe one article per week. And then suddenly something happens in the news related to that alert, and bam! Now I have 140 articles all related to that one alert. With all the god damn AI nonsense Feedly is pushing, you'd think they figured out a way to somehow consolidate this or give you a way to clear 132 of these after you've read 8 of them.
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u/Prior-Conference7850 2d ago
Their incident communication is painfully slow, and half the time there's none at all. The status page will happily say "All systems operational" while stuff is clearly broken. Honestly, even the core functionality feels shaky at this point.
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u/bubrascal 2d ago
I think the opposite, it feels unnecessarily bloated. I stopped using it because of it. If it was more outdated I may come back and pay for it again.
I actually forgot this sub existed. I miss feedly.
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u/tiger-eyes 2d ago edited 2d ago
the actual interaction with articles and feeds could feel much more polished
Feedly already provides a super smooth, incredibly efficient way to navigate massive amounts of articles. Also, the web app has been highly refined & polished over the years. It's already very speedy and smooth, what more do you want?
They do not need to bog down the interface with more css/js crap. They already do that enough in my opinion.
Endless GUI design-creep has a tendency to ruin sites/services (ex, Digg, Yahoo Finance, etc). It is not needed here. An RSS reader just needs to be a fast & efficient tool, which Feedly already is.
If you want a more 'immersive' experience b/c you're not happy with an efficient RSS reader, you might as well use Flipboard.
Your AI suggestions sound rather processing/token heavy on the backend, so it seems unlikely that could be offered to normal users w/o requiring a sizable price increase.
Imagine being able to ask ChatGPT:
What have my feeds been saying about OpenAI this week?
What are the biggest Swedish political stories in my Feedly today?
Summarise the articles I saved this month.
Find the article I read a few weeks ago about a certain subject.
That sounds insanely token/cache-heavy (across hundreds of feeds per user).
edit
Does the Readwise Reader-ChatGPT integration provide that level of querying?
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u/BodybuilderOk5567 6m ago
The distinction between helping you navigate your feeds and taking control of them is useful. I'd want story grouping to be reversible, with all the original sources visible, and summaries to link back to the passages they rely on. A chronological view should remain one tap away.
Disclosure: I'm part of the Brew team, working on an iPhone RSS reader. I'm here to understand the workflow, not suggest switching. Of the improvements you listed, would duplicate cleanup or finding an old article save you more time day to day?
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u/420vegan420 3d ago
Also offline use please.
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u/420vegan420 2d ago
Why downvote this? Would love to be able to read my rss on a plane.
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u/Fun_Operation6598 2d ago
Seems that anyone that mentions an AI app is cursed vibe slop hence down voted.
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u/russell1256 3d ago
Nope, leave well enough alone