So this is it. Tomorrow morning Google Reader just stops. Not "goes into read-only mode," not "gets folded into some other product nobody asked for" — it's just gone, and every RSS feed I've been checking with my coffee since sometime in 2008 either has to find a new home or die with it.
I've known this was coming since March, obviously. Everybody has. The announcement in March kicked off about three and a half months of the tech internet doing its stages-of-grief routine, and I did my share of complaining along with everyone else. But knowing something's coming and actually dealing with it the night before are two different things, and here I am at 11pm on a Sunday finally exporting my subscriptions.xml file like I should've done back in April.
My reader, for context, has about 90 feeds in it. Some are dead (RIP a couple of blogs that just stopped posting in 2011 and I never had the heart to unsubscribe), some are things like xkcd and Daring Fireball that I'd read no matter what the delivery mechanism, and a handful are genuinely niche stuff I'd never find again if the OPML export didn't work right. That last category is the one that's had me nervous for weeks.
Where everybody landed
Feedly is the obvious answer and it's the one I've mostly settled on, if only because they got out ahead of this the fastest. They built something called Normandy back when the shutdown was first announced, basically a Reader-API-shaped backend so that apps like Reeder could point at Feedly instead of Google and barely notice the difference. That mattered more than the Feedly web app itself, honestly, because I do almost all my actual reading in Reeder on my phone, not in a browser tab.
The Old Reader was my second choice for about two weeks in March until they had to pause new signups because everybody and their cousin showed up at once and broke their servers. That's sort of the story of every Reader alternative this spring — a flood of refugees arriving faster than anyone budgeted for. NewsBlur, which I actually like the interface of more than Feedly if I'm being honest, caps you at 64 sites for free and wants $24 a year if you want more than that, which is fine, I just haven't pulled the trigger yet because I am, apparently, willing to spend a Sunday night migrating years of feeds but not eleven dollars a quarter.
And then Digg Reader showed up out of nowhere last Wednesday, the 26th. Digg. The same Digg that most people my age associate with 2008-era link aggregation and a redesign that killed the site's momentum for good. They quietly promised back in the spring that they'd build a reader too, and I honestly forgot about it until it actually launched. I gave it maybe twenty minutes tonight. It's clean, it's fast, and it has basically none of the social or discovery features that made old Digg what it was, which might be the smartest decision they made. I'm not switching to it tonight, but I'm keeping an eye on it.
The part nobody talks about
What actually bugs me isn't losing the product. It's that Reader was one of the last places on the internet that showed me things in the order they happened, from sources I picked, with no ranking algorithm deciding what I should care about first. Everything replacing it is fine. Feedly is fine. But "fine" replacing something that worked exactly the way you wanted for five years still stings a little, and I don't think that feeling is really about RSS technology at all.
Anyway. Export's done, Feedly's synced, Reeder's pointed at the right place. If it breaks tomorrow I'll be annoyed for one morning and then I'll get over it, same as everyone else migrating tonight for the same reason.