Post #3530784

2026-07-02 09:13 UTC

@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer Unpopular take: Google Reader was nothing special, but lots of people who should have known better decided that this re-centralized version of RSS was equivalent to RSS, and so when Google Reader died so did RSS. All the anger about Google killing RSS is wrong, they just killed one barely-above-mediocre app. [ narrator ] RSS is exactly as alive as it ever was. Google Reader's one innovation was "what if cache". It was the Clownflare of blog syndication.

Replies (5)

@dzwiedziu@mastodon.social 2026-07-02 09:19

@jwz@mastodon.social I'll give this a hard “maybe”. GR was useful in a way that it was simple, popular and you had your feeds on multiple devices device. At that time we weren't mostly aware of enshittification. But OTOH we would be crying louder if Google did EEE on RSS with GR. @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer

Open ##3530882
@jwz@mastodon.social 2026-07-02 09:22

@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer As just one data point: in 2023, when Google Reader was killed, there were 69M WordPress sites. In 2026, there are 600M WordPress sites. That means that in the years since Google "killed" RSS, there are *at the very least* 531 million additional RSS feeds.

Open ##3530937
@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer 2026-07-02 09:19

@jwz@mastodon.social Various sources stopped providing RSS feeds because they'd interpreted them as a way to feed into Google Reader, so there was ecosystem impact even outside popular awareness of availability - but you're right, at a technical level everyone could have just carried on doing this with independent clients

Open ##3530984
@gryphonmyers@mastodon.social 2026-07-02 09:28

@jwz@mastodon.social @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer yeah. We can do better.

Open ##3530992
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange 2026-07-02 09:59

@jwz@mastodon.social @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer The problem with most RSS readers was that the read/unread state was tracked in the client. I used to read RSS feeds on my desktop and it was great because I could easily see new and unread things. A few years later, I wanted to read things on my laptop, phone, and tablet, and each one had its own RSS reader, so the state wasn't shared. I didn't use Google Reader, but it would have solved the problem that I actually had. I used NextCloud News (OwnCloud News back then) for a bit, but there were also other problems with RSS (full article vs summary, people messing up stable identifiers, lack of windowing leading to huge fetches, and so on). It's a real shame Atom over XMPP didn't catch on.

Open ##3539116