First I felt anger about the coming closure.

Then I went thru and tried all the competitors, new and old.

Quickly a few rose over what GR ever was and of them I settled with Inoreader - been a happy, paying customer ever since.

GR was holding down the evolution of feed readers by keeping theirs free. That was what, 5 million users not paying anybody for the service? When it was gone, things started moving forward again, fast. So actually, it's good that they closed GR.

Well, compared to native RSS readers Google Reader was crap.

Why do people rememeber it fondly? Was it the fact that it was web based, or was it the only/first RSS reader people have used?

Web-based is big feature who read articles in original website rather than reader itself.

Do people know that other RSS readers exist and always have? I feel like they don’t.

I’ve always used NetNewsWire and it’s never let me down.

Reeder on Mac and iOS is good, been using it for years. You used to need a third party service like Feedly to sync across devices but the latest version has iCloud syncing which is pretty handy.

I stopped reading all the feeds I had after they killed Reader. I couldn't get back into it after having used it for years.

I don’t know if it would still work well these days, but when Google Reader left I genuinely felt less information-abled

I never used Google Reader, but did use other RSS, and I stopped years ago - not because RSS doesn't still work great, it does. But because so much of the content I used to consume with it is gone now. I used to follow a few dozen blogs that got updated regularly, and had RSS feeds. Now almost all those blogs are dead, migrated to Substack or Twitter, or post so infrequently that it's not worth a subscription.

A decade ago, the web browser felt like an endless source of amazing content, and an RSS feed was a great way to keep track of a lot of it at once. Today, I feel like there's still great content, but it's in Twitter feeds and newsletters, and my browser is for accessing webapps and storefronts. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong content or just don't know where to go to find the good stuff anymore, but somehow the end of Google Reader was prophetic, and whether that was a self-fulfilling prophecy or not is up to each of us to decide.

You can follow twitter, facebook, vkontakte, newsletters, youtube etc. with a RSS reader.

The page you're interested in doesn't offer a feed? Try the integrated web feeds from your reader or another source.

https://www.inoreader.com/blog/

I miss it, kinda annoyed by feedly, but not quite enough to find or host my own RSS aggregator.