What’s up with this?

The spirit, of course, is “I want my Google Reader back.”

I should be careful though: I imagine if we really did have it back exactly as it was, it would probably not be as cool as we remember. That was a long-ass time ago and web software just wasn’t as nice as it is now. But: it really did have social features in it! I could leave comments and see comments from my friends. (How “friends” worked back then, I scarcely remember.)

I’m not alone in wanting this. Here’s what I’ve seen so far.

There is Skyreader, and it looks like Tim Disney is still actively working on it:

In my mind (and perhaps not reality?) Skyreader solves a “cold start” problem where signing up for a new social site is a lonely bummer because you don’t have any friends. Well, if all my Bluesky friends were automatically my friends on Skyreader, wouldn’t that be, like, good?

My problem is… I don’t… get it.

• Maybe there aren’t really “friends” on Skyreader? If there are, I can’t really find a list of them. If there aren’t, I guess this isn’t what I’m looking for. Or is it just assumed they are the same as Bluesky friends? I dunno, I think I have a lot to learn about this AT Proto stuff.
• What happens when I share an article? Does it share on my Bluesky? It doesn’t look like it. Who sees my shared articles then? My friends, if there are such a thing? Other people who explicitly subscribe? How would anyone figure out how to do that?
• It looks like I can share and I can highlight stuff specifically in what I share. Who sees the highlight? I imagine they need to use Skyreader to see that highlight? Or does it republish as RSS somehow?
• No comments… right? That’s weird to me for a social feed reader. What I think of when I think social feed reader is 90% writing and reading my friends comments.
• The UI is confusing to me. I don’t love the expanding list format that jumps around a lot.

The main reason I can’t “really use it,” though, is that it doesn’t sync with Feedbin. I understand that’s a niche concern, but I need one canonical feed source, so everything I’m subscribed to is in one place, and how much I’ve read is also canonical. That might be antithetical to AT Proto? I have no idea.

Indieweb has their own version of all this, but it’s seriously no joke getting involved. From one of the reader sites, Togther:

What You Need

#1 Your own website

On the IndieWeb your website is your identity. It doesn’t need to be advanced, it doesn’t need to be pretty, it just needs to be yours.

#2 IndieAuth

IndieAuth is a technology to allow you to sign into services using only your website.

#3 A MicroSub Server

MicroSub is where the real magic happens. There are 2 parts; the server and the client. Together is the client, but it needs a server to go along with it. The server does a lot of tricky work such as fetching & parsing feeds as well as keeping track of what you have read and how you have everything organized. If you don’t already have a MicroSub server then check out Aperture.

#4 MicroPub (optional)

MicroPub is an optional but very cool piece of the puzzle. If your own website has MicroPub functionality then you can use Together not just to read content, but also to reply and create your own content. You can like, repost and reply to stuff you are following, you can even write full on blog posts from inside Together.

I mean, I’m not above some nerd hackin’, but this is 100% not ever going to be a place with a critical mass of my friends just chillin’ and sharing/commenting on blog posts. Way too hard.

The closest thing I’ve seen is CommonRSS by Brad Coffield which was build in a direct response to my original Bluesky post.

I originally had a gut reaction to the vibe coding nature of it. Like I don’t wanna use this thing you slopped together over a weekend, you gotta get more serious about it first. Which I admit is just a gut reaction and not a fair assessment of the software. Brad does seem quite sincere about making it a thing. But at the same time, it feels like it’s been months without updates, which is a bad sign for super brand new software.

In testing it lately…

• It looks great, love the design — but it feels quite slow across the board.
• The Feedbin sync (yay!) didn’t work at first, but appears to be working now.
• It now claims to have 2-way syncing (yay!) but that doesn’t work for me. The articles I read aren’t read in feedbin. The stars don’t sync.
• It’s got the cold-start social problem: there isn’t anyone to follow. The discover page only lists Brad, and clicking the follow button from him doesn’t work.

It feels like it’s close, but it needs to work better. The commenting feature (again, like my main thing for wanting this) requires you to highlight some of the post first, then you can comment, but the comment won’t save.

CommonRSS feels like a solid concept, but it’s both got the cold-start thing in terms of the social network, but also the cold-start thing in terms of a business. My guess is it’s hard for Brad to muster a ton of enthusiasm to work on the project all day every day with low users.

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I’m thinking the main problem is that there just isn’t much of a business to be built around RSS. It can build boutique one-person companies with a passion for it, but even then, difficult.

On top of that, maybe there just isn’t much appetite for the social part? There are a number of arguably already-decently-successful boutique RSS apps, so why haven’t they done it? Why hasn’t Feedbin done anything terribly social? Why not Feedly? Remember FlipBoard’s kind weird taking on RSS? Now they have an equally weird spinoff. My guess is it’s just too hard of work for too little payoff.