Feature: Comparison page of newsreaders

[genmon]

Problem: There are lots of newsreaders (which is a hurdle to getting started because choosing takes energy) and some of them are challenging for users new to feeds on first run (which means there's a risk that news users bounce off. Also, the more newsreaders that are listed, the greater the overhead in checking that the download/add-subscription instructions are accurate and up to date.

One solution is to narrow down on a small number of recommended readers (which is what I've done to start with).

But another solution might be a comparison matrix, narrowed down to just the most popular readers that are aimed at a general audience.

Two questions to start:

• What's a good authority for a list of the top newsreaders, covering all the platforms?
• What are the criteria to decide which of those gets included (as being friendly for new, general users)?

[tullyhansen]

So far as starting points go, Wikipedia has this hot mess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators

And this is… not entirely terrible (but mostly terrible): https://www.slant.co/topics/446/~best-news-readers

[genmon]

Ok, thinking about criteria for inclusion... I'm considering the following as a starting point.

To be considered for inclusion in the comparison table, a newsreader must:

• be actively developed/maintained
• be amongst the most popular for its platform/category (a platform/category can be like "native Windows app" or "self-hosted web" or "GPL") -- (this is to prevent the site from being used to do marketing work for apps)
• address the general use case and be accessible to new users, i.e. not focused on something like SEO or power user features
• not be embedded in another app
• the primary interface must present web feeds as a list of subscriptions, with a list of the latest content. No re-presentation as graphics, or pulling in non-subscribed content, or algorithmic hiding of content. (My view is that there is a place for these kind of apps, but pushing the UX boundaries is not what this particular site is about.)
• be free (in $ terms) up to a reasonably large number of subscribed feeds
• if signup is required, that there is an email-only option (for instance, no requirement to use a FB login)
• have design of "high quality" (whatever that means... I'll choose for the moment)

To be included, the newsreader must have a page on the About Feeds wiki (currently empty) which includes

• all the usual metadata: name, homepage link, platforms
• links the developer site to prove various facts about: date of last update, free tier details + link
• critically, SCREENSHOTS (with a note saying when the screenshot was taken and of what version, and the name of whoever has contributed the screenshot)
  • the signup screen (app only)
  • the "add a feed" screen (app only)
  • what the app looks like with a few subscriptions (this can be from the marketing site)

The screenshots should include app chrome and have an clean white background.

The reason for the screenshots is that the homepage instructions have to work for all recommended newsreaders -- and so we need to ensure that there's not an app which uses a super strange way to add subscriptions.

I know this feels like a pretty high bar to list newsreaders. But the alternative is listing newsreaders as-and-when people suggest them, and I can see it turning into that Wikipedia page out of an overabundance of fairness on our end, and that's no good for new users.