> All feed readers are centralized, even one you run on your laptop.

How so? I'm sure there are plenty of RSS readers on GitHub you could fork and then be safe from the developer abandoning it.

RSS readers are a dime a dozen, and it's trivial to switch between them. I don't really care which one I use, so developer abandonment isn't my concern. The only important things are the list of my feeds and which items I've read. If my laptop goes down, I lose those if I haven't backed them up. If Feedly goes down, I lose those if I haven't backed them up. The difference is that Feedly is more likely than my laptop to give me notice first.

So Feedly is actually better about centralization than using a local reader. As a bonus, everything is synced across all my devices and I can quickly read a few articles on my phone while waiting for my name to be called at the pizza place.

Someone didn't learn.

What didn't I learn? The message couldn't have been to not rely on a centralized service for RSS feeds, because switching to a new service was trivial. I ended up better off than before Reader shut down. My lesson about RSS readers was that it's fine to trust a centralized service because there's basically no risk if it goes away.

I learned a bigger lesson about not trusting Google services in general, but I don't see how that means I shouldn't use Feedly.

> All feed readers are centralized, even one you run on your laptop.

Care to justify that statement?

Your laptop is not a distributed system. If it is lost or destroyed, you lose your feed reader.