Frankly, I don't think most people who run web sites even know that the framework/CMS/rolfburger they're using automatically publishes RSS feeds for them.
Yesterday I stumbled across an app called Fraidy Cat, which is supposed to be a privacy-focused news ingester. I haven't done much with it yet, but I was surprised when I pasted in the URLs of several newspapers that I read, the program showed RSS feeds for all of them. None of the paper web sites have any mention of RSS at all.
Edit: Even the New York Times has RSS:
Latest: https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml
New York: https://www.nytimes.com/section/nyregion
Technology: https://www.nytimes.com/section/technology
Science: https://www.nytimes.com/svc/collections/v1/publish/https://w...
First, in one sense (but doesn't really answer your question) ... the old protocols like RSS (feeds), NNTP (news), IRC (chat), etc are never going to be "dead" because somebody somewhere will always be providing it and somebody somewhere will always be consuming it. Just like horse & buggies are not truly "dead" because a few are being run for tourists and the Amish communities, there are some old dialup BBS's serving callers with old modems even though the internet+web has supplanted it.
I think the longer form of your question for productive discussion is this: Is RSS usage decline possible to reverse with new clients on the web & mobile?
The answer is no. RSS/NNTP/IRC don't have the incentives (both economic and social) that allow them to experience a renaissance. E.g. StackOverflow may someday be supplanted by another Q&A site but it won't be supplanted by NNTP news forums. Same with RSS. Typical mass consumers use Facebook as their "rss" reader. It won't matter what kind of new RSS reader you develop, the typical web surfers don't want to manage RSS feeds.
[0] to the replies below about why "dead" often triggers unproductive arguments:
In observing decades of debates on USENET,BBSs,web, etc... the word "dead" has 2 very different meanings which needlessly causes participants to talk right past each other.
meaning #1: "dead" is harmless synonym for "decline", "losing popularity", "no longer supported", "no longer in mainstream use", etc.
meaning #2: "dead" is provocative synonym for "no longer worth learning", "useless", "stopped working forever", "nobody intelligent is using it", etc.
The amazing phenomenon that happens with asking "Is X Dead?" is that the question asker is almost always innocently using meaning #1 but the most enthusiastic answerers are using meaning #2. This is why "dead" triggers unproductive threads because both sides are talking past each other with different semantics of "dead".
For my part I'm currently building and updating a feedreader / feedparser kit that lets you build a newsfeed in minutes [1] or use a ready-made client such as rubynews [2]
[1]: https://github.com/feedreader/news.rb [2]: https://github.com/planetruby/planet/tree/master/rubynews
PS: The stats on Planet Ruby for RSS vs ATOM are:
Q: What feed formats are in use? Formats (n=51)
atom (52%) | ******************************* 27
rss 2.0 (47%) | **************************** 24The replacement set of broadcast tools is still Facebook, Twitter, Direct, and Newsletters. Newsletters are really the new feed.
Have you heard of podcasts? They're booming and they rely on RSS. The way they're subscribed to and the way they're submitted to large platforms is via their RSS feeds.
I have quite a few websites in my RSS Reader (I love TinyTinyRSS) and over the last 2-3 years I've seen probably ~10 sites get "makeovers" and every time, the RSS feed I was using for those sites has gone away/broken. Each time I've emailed them to ask "Oh hey are you going to bring back RSS" and of the ~4 that replied, 1 bought it back ~3 months later, the other 3 said "Nope, no one uses it" and the others didn't even reply.
So yes, it's on a steep decline I'd say. I love the "But Podcasts use it" argument! There's what, ~100 major podcast sites people use? Yes, RSS is the backend workhorse that makes it work, but the podcast(content) producers aren't using RSS, they'll be uploading their content to a website. RSS is just the backend magic that makes the podcast clients work.
RSS at most sites seems to suffer bitrot. Sometimes the RSS URL is still http when the site has moved to https etc etc.
It's sad to see the decline of it, because an RSS Reader really is a beautiful thing. But yes, RSS as a way to exposing content to people is dying and used by only a very few hardcore "oldschool" people these days I'd suggest.
Whether that meets the standard of being "alive" is probably a community judgement.
[1]: The exact number is hard to get, since a lot of feed hits are for RSS services and not all of them announce their subscriber count in their user agent.
I use hidden RSS feeds on many websites (/feed on Wordpress for example), it is a shame they are not visible.
Is RSS dead? No not by a long shot. Is it as visible as it was in bloggings early days nearly 20 years ago when the spec had been written (2002) and the orange logo was displayed on websites - certainly not.
I think the question needs context - Are you aiming to use it to syndicate content and expect an audience boost because your using RSS- then unlikely - but thats more to do with the state of blogging and syndication in general versus alternative publishing platforms such as facebook and medium.
Are you looking to use it for a syndication standard to base an implementation on for an app or tooling? If the later then you will find RSS has proven itself a rather nice spec that is utterly boring and stable - which is exactly what you want. It is not sexy, nor is it fashionable but it can be foundational - you can build on it and it does what the spec says. No one is likely to applaud your choice - its an old format but a goodie and if you coose to build on it for what its designed for then your likely to get the job done. If you dont like XML and prefer JSON - Manton Reece and Brent Simmons' JSONFeed also does a great job.
My reply to a similar question on HN: https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/12/do-you-still-use-rss/
Social media has replaced RSS feeds for the vast majority of people. They tailor their feed by choosing who to follow and which pages to like, and the writers / media producers ensure that new content is automatically cross posted to their social media accounts so that it appears in people's feeds.
For tech people / people that read more niche sites, RSS is useful, but RSS will never become mainstream or widely adopted given the already widespread adoption of other Internet feeds such as social media platforms.
That said we’re eager to help grow the space. Would love to know if HN has any ideas or feedback on this.
Many different sites offer RSS feeds, many people dont even know they exist unless they are webmasters or advanced users.
Podcasts are based around RSS feeds, even youtube offers RSS feeds. This really is a powerful tool that is all over that you can use to build core infrastructure for social media and knowledge bases. You would be surprised how many backends of websites uses RSS to spread links around the Internet.
It's certainly not dead, but it's not as popular as it used to be.
I have a pet pipe dream that once symmetric upload/download is a thing vs. ADSL (whether FTTH or 5G effects this, I dare not speculate) in 10-20 years, mesh networks and fediverse style stuff will have their greatest opportunity in years to leverage open protocols like RSS, Delta.Chat's chatting over autocrypt-encrypted emails, chat-over-Wifi-SSID and more to split open the walled gardens that people are in mainly because of their network effects and lack of a convenient alternative.
I don't know how younger people do it but I can't see any other way to get my preferred news in one organized headline only in an outline-like place. Maybe I am just old school but I really like RSS as I am able to get through headlines from tech, finance, etc on daily basis and go through them quickly. Anything that pikes my interest I click on the headline and it takes me to the site to read whole article. One of my favorite things to do while winding down in bed.
RSS though is like a foreign language to the under 35 crowd when I have brought it up or they have seen me using it. So it is already dead in that sense. They just prefer to get their news through Instagram/Facebook feeds or just visiting their few preferred websites directly.
I am not sure what RSS Reader people are using these days, but I have been using Feedly since Reader discontinued. And as long as they keep their free tier I dont see myself stop using them.
I think most people who use RSS are nerds or geeks anyway. So in terms of usage it is very small in the world where we have 4 billion Smartphone users. And I dont even look for RSS icon in website. I just search it inside Feedly to see if they have it listed. And most of the time they do.
The problem with RSS is no one has figure out a sustainable business model or UX for the majority of the market.
Is Something "Dead" in tech often means something entirely different to its literal sense. What the precise word you are / may be looking for is declining.
Spotify, iHeartRadio, and others want to wall off podcasts but their selection is still too limited. Frankly their apps frustrate me greatly. Trying to play things back on Xubuntu while writing is too much of a challenge compared to pairing gPodder & VLC.
I have a blog and a newsletter that doesn’t duplicate the blog. Using TinyLetter forces me to shoot for long form pieces and to get them in good shape. I also end up approaching things in the newsletter that I don’t on my blog.
I can’t remember if the bot on Telegram is fed by RSS but that’s how I spotted this anyhow...
Some new sites don't have it at all, when https://www.thefarside.com/ came to life I didn't have a way to follow it until someone made feed based on scraping.
Most sites seem to have a sitemap for search, I wish my reader app could fall back to that.
Behind the package is just a list of websites and their RSS URLs.
For example, the input is "nytimes.com" and the output is all the latest news.
So, it's quite alive.
It drives me nuts that Facebook Messenger does exactly what Skype does, which does exactly what AIM did, which did exactly what ICQ did, etc.
None of these platforms get better, in fact, each one rots over time, driving people to whatever the next platform is -- people keep moving to escape the rot but they never get ahead.
It's a bit much to try to explain in the comments here - but I am glad to answer questions and hear from others who are trying this kind of thing. RSS isn't dead at all - in fact, I'm introducing some extensions for it next week.
Imo there are two uses for RSS. 1) People who still scroll through a digest of news at certain times in their day. I envy these people for their disciplined habits.
2) And having a service that syncs news to your device via RSS for when you're not online.
Do I need a list? Nah. If I did, it'd be more telling about me than RSS anyways.
This is one of the few reasons I still use 'View Source' functionality in browsers.
Even with this downside, it is still way better than some website-specific account thing you have to sign up for (Hello, SmackJeeves)
There simply is no substitute.
Btw, Podcasting is an interesting window on what an XML-powered web might have been: a multitude of different specialised clients and semantic aggregators, consuming content in agnostic formats, with no dependency on a handful of big browsers. Like a 1955 illustration of “Tomorrow World”, it still looks like a nice future, even though we know it will probably never happen.
As to new clients, it's hard to say. Gnome RSS just became a thing (relatively recently, emphasis on relatively) and I love it. AntennaPod is great for podcast subscriptions and I find Feeder is perfectly adequate on mobile.
It is a specialist tool though. That's the thing. It means it is as likely to get a new set of shiny clients as say, IRC. Which is to say, probably not.
Not dead. Absurdly useful. Quite possibly niche, but is it a niche of valuable users? Maybe.
Example: Vice wrote an article titled "The rise and demise of RSS" (you can google it). Now go to their homepage, look at the page source, and there you go:
This thread inspires me to pull in some jQuery and change the project name to Graveyard.
https://www.bilbof.com/following
It’s open source if you want to run your own: https://github.com/bilbof/feed
Which is often useful but mostly I'd like to be the one who decides about the sources to check out. Then I turn to a feed reader. I would be driven insane if this technology were not at hand, aggregating a plethora of resources into a single comprehensive UI. I use the excellent Bazqux Reader for this (which in my opinion continues the legacy of Google Reader in the best way).
It requires some setup and imho is a bit expensive (Pro+ plan required) but this announcement should give a good overview of its capabilities: https://blog.feedly.com/leo/
Innovation in the RSS space is still happening and therefore I wouldn't call it 'dead'.
Speaking from my own experience running Feedity - https://feedity.com, a growing service that helps with custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages.
It's a pity, as Web feeds in JSON can be produced in a more ad-hoc fashion – an even more simple format with one entry per JSON feed line (admittedly with redundancy across lines) would have been great, too.
RSS was largely supposed to be a hidden bit of infrastructure, allowing some intermediary (like an RSS-to-email-digest gateway, or a news aggregator service) to scrape the RSS feed and convert that into useful notifications/events/messages in some form. The idea was that you, as an author, would pick one of these services, set up an account with it, and point it at your RSS feed URL; and then you'd put a link to that service on your page, which your users could then subscribe to, in place of subscribing to your site itself. Just like a regular email-notification service, but with the webhook part "turned around" so that it's the service poking your server, rather than your server poking the service.
"RSS Readers" were never meant to happen; RSS was never meant to be used as a direct link between authors and users. If you think about it, such a direct M:N link is exactly the opposite of what an author with a simple static resource-constrained blog wants—their whole user-base would now constantly be polling their (or their ISP's) dinky little server! (But it's fine in practice, since we eventually got Cloudflare and PuSH.)
If you're a content author with a full-on web-app, you can call out (with webhooks, or messages in a message queue, or even API calls to a service like Sendgrid or Twilio), and so, for you, RSS is unnecessary. As we've seen higher-level PaaS-style personal web hosts like Netlify, Squarespace, and WordPress.com supplant the old-school Apache public_html/-style hosting, fewer and fewer authors have needed RSS, because they've had access to other methods to deliver notifications directly.
As well, microblogging (mostly in the form of posting links to your new blog posts on either a Twitter account, Facebook page, or subreddit dedicated to your blog) also take the place of notifications of new content on the blog, as well as providing the bonus feature of moving the "comments section" of your posts outside the blog itself, such that you no longer need to host or moderate it. Many people today combine a static-site-generator blog on S3/Github Pages/etc. (having no real "front page", only at most an "all posts" archive for web spiders) with an external, mostly-ephemeral social-network-microblog "index" of their blog.
RSS still exists for those authors who it serves, of course; but it's always been an author-side feature, and so, if you're seeing it less, it's because fewer authors need it.
(And, if this annoys you as a consumer-of-feeds, know that RSS is probably not the universal-notifications-infrastructure you want. Please don't write gateways that scrape pages and spit out RSS. If anything, emit emails. Mail readers are a strict superset of RSS readers, and usually do everything RSS readers do better than RSS readers do those things; but that's a topic for another post.)
I currently using it through my own web app that's aggregating RSS, Reddit, HN, Twitter and Youtube.
Planning for a long time to launch it as a product but never got around it.
Funny how anyone can define History.
Conclusion: not dead.
Pretty lively dead standard!
No, it's not dead. Use it if you want to.
Here be no adverts.
Valid reasons for continuing to invest in having this feature on your websites include better discoverability of your content by various content aggregators that still depend on this. In short, if you are running any kind of blog or news site, it probably helps you to have some RSS feeds but not not a lot.
But lets be real, a lot of RSS out there is just a side effect of many companies having used the same CMS for more than a decade. It's just something the CMS does by default. I stopped using feed readers some time after Google reader shut down. I used feedly and inoreader for a while but found myself opening that less and less over the years. I still have the bookmark but haven't looked at it in over a year and have not added any new feed in probably close to five years.
These days I depend on HN, twitter, and a few other social media accounts to discover content. I use but am increasingly unhappy with Google News; or rather what's left of it after Google's AI hipsters got their hands on it and turned into a clickbait aggregator to drive their ad revenue. Trump trump trump, more trump, did you know trump farted? etc. It's hopelessly biased to crap I definitely don't care about. All my attempts to nudge it away to more interesting stuff seem to be not working. I hope he loses the election; mainly it because it might clean up my news feed.
By chance I'm actually working on a project currently where I'm dealing with RSS feeds. A lot of feeds out there are actually shockingly bad in terms of content, usage of fields, etc. You get stupid things like brain-dead marketeers putting their company name in every title and description; people forgetting to add a timestamp. Or categories. Or an image. These things kind of matter if you want to aggregate and present content from multiple sources. Looking bad is never a good thing for any company whose primary business model is content distribution (i.e. major news papers and magazines).
this feels like almost "is rss dead" spam
No. RSS isnt dead. I got this link FROM RSS.