RSS still holds on, and the reader decides what comes next

This site publishes a feed. Nobody asked me to, no audience analysis justifies it, and I know perfectly well that most visitors will never click it. I set it up because it’s the only way I know to let someone read me without an intermediary deciding for them when, or whether, my articles show up.

A deliberately dumb format

Technically, there’s nothing to tell. An XML file, a list of entries, a title, a date, a link, a content. The RSS 2.0 specification fits on one page. Atom, its standardised cousin from the IETF, is a little stricter about identifiers and dates. Both do the same thing: say what’s new, with enough metadata for a program to find its way around.

That dumbness is the main feature. No account, no session, no token, no negotiation. A client downloads a static file and compares it with what it had last time. My feed is generated at build time and served like any other file, so it only goes down if the site goes down.

What changes when sorting goes back to the reader

An algorithmic feed optimises a variable that isn’t mine: time spent. A feed reader does just one thing: it sorts by date and waits. The practical consequences are immediate.

• a site that publishes once a month doesn’t disappear behind one that publishes six times a day
• nothing gets inserted in the middle by an advertiser
• an article you’ve read stays read, it doesn’t come back in a different order
• if a feed bores me, I remove it, and there’s no recovery loop to put it back in front of me

It’s also much calmer. A feed doesn’t send notifications, doesn’t show badges, doesn’t suggest anyone. It piles up and waits, which can make for a shamefully long queue, but it’s my queue.

Why we tried to bury it

RSS didn’t decline for technical reasons. It declined because it can’t reliably carry advertising, barely collects any usage data, and above all doesn’t put anyone between the author and the reader. A format that can’t be monetised has no commercial department to defend it in a meeting.

The shutdown of the most widely used feed reader, in 2013, did the rest: it scattered an audience that never fully rebuilt its habit, just as social feeds were taking over. It wasn’t a conspiracy, just a product portfolio decision. The result is the same.

It never really died

Podcasts still run on RSS today, across their whole ecosystem, which is also why you can switch podcast app without losing your subscriptions. Many sites publish a feed without ever promoting it. Free feed readers can be self-hosted in a container, which is what I did on my machine, and the whole setup uses fewer resources than an open social media tab.

I’m not claiming it replaces everything. I just notice that a technology with no company behind it, no funding round and no roadmap still works twenty years on, while three platforms that were supposed to replace it have already changed names.