Why RSS still matters

Every few years a tech blog runs "RSS is dead" as a headline, and ironically many people read this from their "RSS reader". Every podcast that has said the same thing was carried in an RSS feed to you so that your app could play it.

Every few years they're wrong, and every few years the correction is the same: RSS wasn't killed in 2013; one product was: Google Reader.

The format kept shipping. The people using it kept using it. What actually died was the expectation that a single company owned your feed.

RSS is still the reason you can leave. And you should probably take charge of owning your data. Let companies own copies of your data.

It's the only widely-deployed format that lets you move your reading relationship with a writer from one tool to another without asking either of them for permission. You export a file, you import it somewhere else, you're reading again. No one has to broker the move. No one can stop it. That's not a feature of a reader app. That's a civil liberty for the reading web, and it's older than most apps that make it trivial.

You're already using it

If you think RSS is a niche concern for retired tech enthusiasts, a short inventory:

• Every podcast. All of them. Spotify, Apple, Pocket Casts, Overcast — they all consume RSS feeds at the bottom. When your favorite show posts a new episode, an XML file on some server somewhere updates; your app polled it; that's the whole transaction.
• Every Substack. Every newsletter on the platform ships an RSS version. Add /feed to the end of the URL — it's there. Same for Ghost, WordPress, Bearblog, and essentially every hosted writing tool that takes itself seriously.
• Mastodon, Bluesky, and their peers. Each account has a feed URL. You can read someone's posts in an RSS reader without making an account on the network.
• Every major news site. CNN, BBC, NYT, the Guardian, the Journal. All still ship feeds, sometimes reluctantly, but they ship them.
• Every GitHub release. Every tag, every commit, every PR if you want it. Developers use this every day without thinking of it as RSS.

This is not a retired technology. This is under almost everything you read.

The Google Reader lesson

When Google killed Reader in 2013, two lessons were available.

The one that got coverage: RSS is dead.

The one that was actually true: depending on a single commercial product for your reading infrastructure is a terrible idea.

But for more than 10 years the format has survived by not needing Google.

Readers scattered to Feedly, Inoreader, NewsBlur, Reeder, NetNewsWire, FreshRSS, Tiny Tiny RSS, Miniflux, and a dozen others. Everyone re-imported their feeds. The feeds don't care.

That's the thing commercial platforms never quite internalize: the feed does not care how you use it. It doesn't care. It publishes the same XML to anyone who asks. Which means the data starts free and open. Then readers choose to lock themselves in a garden - for convenience or other reasons. But the data was never locked.

What RSS gives you that an app doesn't

• Portability. A Web-Feed-Archive (an OPML file) is basically a file that describes every feed you subscribe to. Copy it out. Paste it in. Done.
• Longevity. A feed URL published in 2005 still works today. Try that with any social network's API.
• Chronology. Items arrive in the order they were published. No ranking model. No engagement weighting. No "you might also like." So if you want those you can add them in. On your terms.
• No accounts. The feed doesn't know who you are. There's no tracking pixel, no cookie, no "sign in to continue reading."
• No algorithm. Because your system grabs the data, you are in charge. Otherwise the system has content and it's grabbing readers to read it. Do you own your subscriptions? Or do your subscriptions own you?

What RSS doesn't give you

Being honest: there are real things the format doesn't do on its own.

• Discovery. RSS doesn't tell you what feeds exist. You need somewhere else to find them.
• Social. The format has no built-in notion of "my friend read this" or "here's who else follows this feed."
• Search. You can read a feed, but full-text search across everything you've ever seen is a reader's job, not the format's.

These are real gaps, and they're why RSS alone isn't enough to build a modern reading product around. They're also why feed.works exists: we think you can add discovery, shared reads, and search on top of feeds without undoing many of the joys of using feeds. The feed stays; everything else is value we add around it.

The calm argument

Here's the short version of why we still bet on this: RSS is free and open.

There's no algorithm deciding what you see next. There's no engagement bait in the format because the format can't bait you — it's a list of things in the order they happened. That's not a limitation. That's the product.

Sure we are a little nostalgic for 2005, but that's not why we built feed.works. We build because 2005 had one thing right that 2025 forgot: you decide what you read, and a feed is a reasonable way to describe what you've decided.

RSS still matters because leaving still matters. And for anything under feeds — podcasts, newsletters, blogs, even the parts of social media that still respect the format — RSS is the reason you can.