People have been announcing the death of RSS for more than ten years. Yet it is still at work every day, starting with almost every podcast you listen to.
A very simple idea
An RSS feed is a file published by a website, listing its latest content in a machine-readable format. A piece of software, the feed reader, checks that file regularly and shows you what's new. There is no account to create on the site, no algorithm, no middleman.
The first version appeared at Netscape in 1999. Dave Winer then played a central role in its evolution, Aaron Swartz contributed to the RSS 1.0 specification at a very young age, and arguments over the format led to Atom, standardized in 2005.
What a feed really contains
Open a feed in a text editor: it is just fairly readable XML. You find the name of the site, then a series of items, each with a title, a link, a date and an identifier.
<item>
<title>RSS, the format that refuses to die</title>
<link>https://example.org/rss-format</link>
<guid isPermaLink="false">example-org-rss-format</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 06 Nov 2026 16:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
<description>Its death has been announced for over ten years.</description>
</item>That identifier looks like a detail. It lets the software know an article has already been seen, even if its title was corrected. When a site changes it by mistake, dozens of old posts reappear at once as if they had just been published.
Golden age, then winter
In the mid-2000s the orange icon was everywhere. Blogs lived on it, and Google Reader, launched in 2005, became a daily tool for a great many readers. Its shutdown in July 2013 felt like a funeral. Meanwhile Facebook and Twitter had captured people's attention, and many sites removed the button from their pages, without necessarily removing the feed.
Why it never went away
Because it costs almost nothing, and nobody owns it. A feed keeps working without anyone having to approve it. WordPress produces them automatically. Podcasts have relied on them from the start, which is why you can still listen in the app of your choice.
A social feed chooses for you, and it chooses what holds your attention. A feed reader does the opposite: it shows what you asked for, usually in chronological order, and it stops when there is nothing left. That ending is its most underrated quality.
Getting started
Pick a reader, subscribe to a dozen sites, and don't try to read everything. Many sites still publish a feed without saying so: try adding /feed or /rss to the address. What deserves more time can go into a reading list, for later.
Finding a site's feed
The button has often disappeared, the feed hasn't. Many sites declare it in the code of their pages, for software to find, and a good reader will locate it if you simply give it the address of the site.
YouTube, many forums, GitHub and publishing services like Mastodon still offer feeds without really saying so. You can follow a video channel, the new releases of a piece of software or someone's account, with no sign-up and no recommendations.
A different way of keeping up
A feed reader is also more demanding than a social network. Nobody suggests new sources. You have to find them yourself, often by following the links of authors you already like. And a blog that has been silent for months isn't flagged by anything, which has its charm: when it publishes again, its text arrives in the same place, as if it had never left.
Over time, a good list of feeds becomes a personal tool. It reflects what you actually want to read, not what a recommendation system thinks will keep you there. You prune it when a site loses its interest, you add to it when a friend shares something good, and nobody else has a say.
The limits to know about
It isn't all rosy. A feed has no reliable audience measurement, which publishers dislike. It offers no natural way of paying an author. Subscription sites generally restrict their feeds to headlines. And many large platforms have removed their public feeds to keep their users inside.
There is also a technical constraint: every reader polls the site regularly, and some servers block requests that look too automated. A feed can stop working with no explanation, while the site works perfectly in a browser.
Despite all that, RSS holds on. It doesn't need to win in order to keep existing, it only needs a few million sites and readers to still find it practical. That is a rare fate on the web, where open standards have outlived many of the companies meant to replace them.