Post #1969696
2026-05-04 18:22 UTC
Replies (31)
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@fahrni@curmudgeon.cafe 2026-05-04 18:32
@jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz Where are you hearing this? 😳
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@jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz 2026-05-04 18:32
The only thing that died was Google Reader, and that didn't come close to "taking down RSS". Today there are more options for reading and authoring RSS/Atom feeds than there ever were in the past. We've never had this many good apps and services in the RSS/Atom ecosystem. I think there were some really interesting aspects of Google Reader that I do regret losing. But it's just so weird to hear people say things like "Ahh yes, RSS, that was a very elegant thing, I'm nostalgic for the days when we had that..." It's like being nostalgic for the good old days when the sun used to go up in the morning and come down in the evening. It's still doing that!
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@edwinb@types.pl 2026-05-04 18:26
@jonmsterling I love RSS. One of the (few) things I self-host is a feed reader, and pretty much every site I'm interested in paying attention to publishes a feed. I don't think it's going away.
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@RosaCtrl@social.vivaldi.net 2026-05-04 18:30
@jonmsterling I’ve never stopped using an aggregator since Bloglines!
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@db@typo.social 2026-05-04 19:31
@jonmsterling yes! maybe it’s attentional bias but it feels like I’ve read one variation or another of this idea daily these past few weeks, very aggravating
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@dlzv@mathstodon.xyz 2026-05-04 19:38
@jonmsterling RSS is the main way I find content to read on the internet. Mastodon comes a very distant second. I have never found it difficult to find RSS feeds on blogs or websites that interest me, and for the few missing I usually convert their email newsletter to an RSS feed through https://kill-the-newsletter.com/, which works extremely well. I agree with you that RSS seems very alive and well!
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@KitsuWhooa@fedi.tasossah.com 2026-05-04 22:56
@jonmsterling While I do mostly agree, as an avid RSS/Atom user, it does seem like there is little care put into it these days. At the very least, it has been enshittified to an extent. Almost every night like clockwork, the YouTube feeds go down and I pray they come back up again and that this isn't the last time someone bothered to fix whatever went wrong with them. YouTube has 0 reason to keep them up. Many other websites only show partial content in a feed. Whether it's the first parapgraph of an article, or a comic strip that is too long and got abruptly cut off without you realising it, it's to make you click "view more" so that they get the sweet web tracking revenue. And as far as I know I haven't found anyone offering a way to pay to get full content in your reader. Finally, Mozilla pretty much killed the only way you had to detect feeds in pages. There used to be a tab in the Ctrl+I menu in Firefox that'd show you all the feeds in a page. Now you have to resort to something like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/boring-rss/ It's kinda difficult to view this as major players caring about it. If anything, it mostly exists because someone added it as a feature at some point and it never broke. In addition, I don't think most Wordpress site owners even know what RSS is or that they even provide it. I had to explicitly email someone because their feeds broke and they had no idea it was a thing in the first place. Still, even as a niche, I am really glad it exists.
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@naught101@mastodon.social 2026-05-04 23:00
@jonmsterling the one-ubiquitous RSS buttons disappeared, it's far less obvious how to use it for mast people. The tech might still be there, but the affordances collapsed.
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@micahilbery@mstdn.social 2026-05-04 23:15
@jonmsterling while I see RSS feeds just as prevalent, unfortunately I find them less useful than they used to be as a lot of feeds are just a link back to the site with nothing but a headline and a "read it on the site" and/or "sign up for our newsletter". I want RSS to be my primary way to read the web but more and more feeds are basically useless. To be clear I don't think RSS is dead, but you can see how the ad funded web has hurt it's usefulness.
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@rockario@kind.social 2026-05-05 00:01
@jonmsterling Tumblr has RSS feeds!
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@Canageek@wandering.shop 2026-05-05 00:01
@jonmsterling Every tumblr has one, every Reddit user has one for their posts, and every subreddit has one for all posts
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@steeph@queerchen.de 2026-05-05 00:34
@jonmsterling YT still has RSS feeds? Mime stopped working when Twitter still had RSS feeds. I remember switching RSS generating services every time my current one stopped working for YT channels until I gave up. Maybe I just didn't know the right URL.
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@evert@indieweb.social 2026-05-05 00:51
@jonmsterling There's a huge difference between the kind of popularity during the height of the 'blogosphere' and today. Lots of things ship RSS but that's (thankfully) because it's enabled by default. It's not even discoverable anymore by browsers by default unless publishers take the time to add a button. I think what people are lamenting is how front and center self-publishing and consumption of RSS was by a more general audience, not the fact that wordpress ships an Atom feed by default.
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@AdmiralMemo@mastodon.social 2026-05-05 03:08
@jonmsterling I'm currently looking up some RSS-to-Mastodon converters so I can pull my Tumblr feed onto my Mastodon feed.
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@Felis_Catus_Domesticus@mstdn.party 2026-05-05 03:45
@jonmsterling RSS is dead! Long live RSS!
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@LarsFosdal@mastodon.social 2026-05-05 04:31
@jonmsterling The excellent Vivaldi browser has an email-like RSS reader bult in, which is very handy, since you can sift through all your RSS sources even while offline.
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@LarsFosdal@mastodon.social 2026-05-05 04:33
@jonmsterling I suspect that ad-ridden sites prefer that people don't skip reading their ad-heavy front pages and fluff pieces, since RSS allows you to skip direcly to the few posts that actually have content that interests you.
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@ljwrites@writeout.ink 2026-05-05 06:08
@jonmsterling Stuff like "RSS is dead" is so funny to me because how have I read almost 10,000 feed items across 40+ feeds then?? What happened to RSS isn't that it "died" but that it resisted commercialization and became part of the infrastructure of the Web, sometimes well-hidden (I use a browser extension to find them myself) but expanding along with the Web itself.
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@Monzz@elekk.xyz 2026-05-05 07:11
@jonmsterling I literally set myself up for RSS reading in the last month, it was probably even easier than it was the last time I did it. Plenty of readers with lovely features.
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@jonathan859@someplace.social 2026-05-05 08:50
@jonmsterling Every GitHub repo as commit and release atom feeds...
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@nini@oldbytes.space 2026-05-05 09:02
@jonmsterling Feel like I've seen "the idea that RSS/Atom is dead is stupid" more than "RSS/Atom is dead".
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@mikro2nd@indieweb.social 2026-05-05 10:24
@jonmsterling Ask yourself, "Whose interests are served by that narrative? Who is pushing that story?"
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@Kroc@oldbytes.space 2026-05-05 12:00
@jonmsterling Sounds useful. Perhaps browsers should consider integrating RSS functionality :|
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@ondrosik@fedi.ml 2026-05-05 12:05
@jonmsterling Hmm, youtube channnels have rss feeds too? I thought that it doesn't work anymore, I need to investigate this again.
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@giantpinkrobots@mastodon.social 2026-05-05 12:37
@jonmsterling It's less about RSS itself being dead, but blogs, which are mostly dead.
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@liamoc@types.pl 2026-05-05 14:28
@jonmsterling I make an Atom feed for my weeknotes but I don't really consume RSS feeds myself - at least not yet. Do you have any recommended apps or workflows that work for you?
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@CassandraVert@indieweb.social 2026-05-05 16:18
I've seen more sites get RSS in the last few years, not fewer.
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@benjamineskola@hachyderm.io 2026-05-05 17:45
@jonmsterling I find it particularly weird when it’s claimed that killing Google Reader killed RSS really? because, well, as you say, RSS is still fine, but anyway, was google reader ever so significant that it could have had such a disproportionate impact? (My guess: people who didn’t really use RSS only really know about Google Reader, and maybe conversely, people who used Google Reader weren’t very committed to RSS and so just gave up on RSS as a whole when GR went away.)
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@ahto@tiggi.es 2026-05-05 18:27
@jonmsterling fwiw, I have been meaning to write a new RSS program for funsies. However, I think the lack of organisation has been issue with my previous attempts and with other things just locking up/making it more difficult to access I would probably want to make it an RSS app that has some bookmarking utils and configuration for launching apps for music/videos. Idk, things to ponder and design before I put it on the backburner.
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@XerShadowTail@chitter.xyz 2026-05-06 03:41
@jonmsterling I still manually write an RSS feed for my project, which gets committed in and versioned. Everything just works with it.
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@imclaren@infosec.exchange 2026-05-06 09:13
@jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz when they say it’s dead, what they mean is there’s no way to insert a paywall or otherwise get between the rss provider and users and clip the ticket.