
Ask HN: Is RSS dead? - totaldude87
Or is there a hope for new clients on web and mobile .
======
reaperducer
I think a lot of people think RSS is dead because they never see it promoted
anywhere. Pretty much every web site has a row of social media icons, but
hardly ever is there an RSS icon in the row, even if the web site supports it.

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](https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml)

New York:
[https://www.nytimes.com/section/nyregion](https://www.nytimes.com/section/nyregion)

Technology:
[https://www.nytimes.com/section/technology](https://www.nytimes.com/section/technology)

Science:
[https://www.nytimes.com/svc/collections/v1/publish/https://w...](https://www.nytimes.com/svc/collections/v1/publish/https://www.nytimes.com/section/science/rss.xml)

~~~
sdan
I think it’s Wordpress that enables /rss on a ton of websites.

I’ve recently needed to get RSS feeds and a good number of times I can find it
via /rss or view the source of the site and search for xml.

~~~
stijnsanders
Ooh, i stumbled across this one site that I wanted to add to my feed reader,
didn't find <link rel="alternative"> tags in the header, but a <link
rel="[https://api.w.org/">](https://api.w.org/">) tag. I'm not sure it is
their intention to open up the WordPress back-end, but I found how to get the
list of articles from it, so added support for it to my own feed-reader:
[https://github.com/stijnsanders/feeder#feeder](https://github.com/stijnsanders/feeder#feeder)

------
zenlot
Opened this post using RSS in Inoreader. All my news comes via RSS. I use it
for news sites, I use it for Medium and I also use it for Reddit. The nice
thing about it, is that everything stays in one place, categorized and I can
see unread counts. Especially useful while checking reddit feeds. There's no
infinite scroll and I can clearly see/mark what's been read and what's not. I
can come back later and continue from where I left or review my favorites. If
the site does not have RSS, or I can't make it appear in Inoreader - most
likely I won't be visiting it again, or at least not scrolling daily. RSS
gives you freedom and saves you _a lot_ of time.

~~~
timbit42
I use it for eBay and Kijiji. Great for sniping.

~~~
vroomik
I use Inoreader too, care to explain how do you use it for ebay? I've tried to
add sub from ebay url to no avail..

------
jasode
By asking the question using the word "dead"[0] which has such offensive
connotations, it will spur some to say "it's not dead" \-- which isn't really
going to be productive for what I think you're _really_ asking.

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".

~~~
reggieband
RSS does play a growing role in a few places: podcasts [1] and virtual
assistant apps (e.g. Alexa [2], Google Home[3], etc.) Although in both cases
consumers do not tend to have direct access to it.

1\.
[https://itunespartner.apple.com/podcasts/articles/creating-y...](https://itunespartner.apple.com/podcasts/articles/creating-
your-show_requirements)

2\. [https://developer.amazon.com/en-
US/docs/alexa/flashbriefing/...](https://developer.amazon.com/en-
US/docs/alexa/flashbriefing/flash-briefing-skill-api-feed-reference.html)

3\.
[https://developers.google.com/news/assistant/newsbriefings/t...](https://developers.google.com/news/assistant/newsbriefings/technical-
requirements)

~~~
drdeadringer
I remember a time before RSS in the late 1990s.

Now, for the past 6 years, I use RSS as my primary method of downloading
podcast episodes and webcomic issues. I'm currently subscribed to about 60.

Dead? No. Declining? I can't say that for myself let alone writ large.

~~~
8bitsrule
If some site chirps 'listen to our podcast', I'll have a look for acceptable
(e.g. no password) feed URLs. If they don't make one obvious, they've lost
their chance. Generally, IME those worth downloading offer RSS.

------
geraldbauer
See [http://isrssdead.com](http://isrssdead.com)

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](https://github.com/feedreader/news.rb)
[2]:
[https://github.com/planetruby/planet/tree/master/rubynews](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%) | **************************** 24

------
thinkingkong
RSS the protocol, or RSS the experience? The Protocol is alive and kicking, as
far as being available, but it's been more or less killed by publishers not
promoting it out of the box. AFAIK ad revenue is basically the reason.

The replacement set of broadcast tools is still Facebook, Twitter, Direct, and
Newsletters. Newsletters are really the new feed.

~~~
scarface74
I have yet to find a website that I feel should have an RSS feed that doesn’t
have one.

~~~
timbit42
The Globe & Mail shut down their RSS feed a while ago. They're dead to me now.

~~~
52-6F-62
Whoa they did? I haven’t been using RSS as much lately but I’ve been reading
less news.

I wonder if it’s because they hardened their paywall.

That’s disappointing. For a while they were the most forward Canadian paper,
digitally.

------
AlchemistCamp
> Is RSS Dead

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.

~~~
slg
The podcast industry might be booming, but the days of nearly every podcast
being freely available with an RSS feed is certainly over. Granted this is
mostly a business decision rather than a technical decision. Companies like
Spotify want you to listen to their podcasts on their platform. This allows
them to better track ad statistics and push other revenue streams compared to
podcasts served over traditional RSS feeds.

~~~
philsnow
> This allows them to better track ad statistics and push other revenue
> streams compared to podcasts served over traditional RSS feeds.

It's not just better ad statistics -- with apps like Stitcher/Spotify, the app
contains both discovery and download, and also the player. When you listen to
podcasts on their apps, they're able to report useful, interesting metrics to
podcast producers like skip rate, bounce rate, etc. They're valuable metrics.

As far as I know, podcasts that are distributed by RSS and consumed by the
apple podcasts app / any other app don't gather these metrics. There's no
reason they _couldn 't_ though, because RSS / Atom have plenty of flexibility
to add a field for a metric reporting callback/webhook. We could have an open
convention for what goes over that webhook, maybe even some competition in
providing podcast playback metrics as a service.

(... does this all exist already and I'm just behind the times?)

~~~
raghavtoshniwal
There are plenty of 'open' standards[0] for webhooking and reporting ads,
however there isn't much client support. As far as listening metrics go, Apple
has implemented non intrusive podcast analytics already[1].

Podcasts work really well as is. They don't need fixing. Barrier to entries
are low, and like the early days of youtube, you can have a successful podcast
with a relatively low production value. They are published openly, monetizing
gets easier with some traction. There is so much cross promotion that
discoverability isn't a challenge either. I just hope the 'open podcast
ecosystem' can resist attempts to be destroyed by Spotify/Luminary etc. This
happy medium doesn't need personalized targeted advertising.

[0]: [https://rad.npr.org/dotorg/about-rad/](https://rad.npr.org/dotorg/about-
rad/) [1]:
[https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/501/](https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/501/)

------
muppetman
I'd say it's on the decline, yes.

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.

------
woodruffw
According to my httpd logs, between 50 and 100 people[1] are fetching my (not
particularly popular) blog via RSS daily. That's enough people for it to be
(personally) worth ensuring that RSS continues to function.

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.

------
wenbin
No. Podcast is booming. And podcasts are distributed via rss. Every podcast
player is basically a rss client.

~~~
Causality1
The industry's seeming loss of interest in RSS as a technology does have me
wondering, is there a replacement for podcasts? Are podcasts migrating away
from RSS as their primary distribution concern? If there is a replacement, is
it platform-independent like RSS or does it hinge on a single company like
Apple?

~~~
chrisrhoden
I think podcasters generally only care about RSS because it's how to get into
the Apple Podcasts app.

There are many hosting companies that will create friction and pain if a
consumption platform attempts to vertically integrate and eliminate the idea
that you can publish a podcast on any web server, but we're already in a world
where some of the consumption platforms have distinct flavors of RSS published
especially for them.

Not hard to imagine one of them offering better support if you use a more
custom integration, which it's not impossible to imagine major hosting
providers building.

------
dade_
Newsblur is my Internet's start page. We use MS Teams at work and I have
noticed that coworkers have setup RSS subscription channels to follow
businesses, etc.

I use hidden RSS feeds on many websites (/feed on Wordpress for example), it
is a shame they are not visible.

~~~
Yhippa
Thanks for mentioning this. I dug up my old NewsBlur account and it's pretty
slick. I had a lot of issues with Feedly and other aggregators. I was
pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of the sites I visit have RSS feeds
still.

------
gramakri
I use TinyTinyRSS every day and it's my primary way to access the internet. I
can say that in my bubble it's not dead.

~~~
ThinkingGuy
I literally just discovered and installed tt-rss last week, and it's
revolutionized my daily online reading (and listening)

------
ptrott2017
Firstly - call out to Dave Winer - his work on outliners and RSS have both
proven incredible useful, influential and long lasting.

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.

------
tryonlinux
Literally used rss to see this question lol

~~~
ashwinaj
Lol, same here

------
jlelse
This seems to be a question regularly popping up. My answer: it's not dead. I,
and I think many other people, still use RSS.

My reply to a similar question on HN:
[https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/12/do-you-still-use-
rss/](https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/12/do-you-still-use-rss/)

~~~
hitchhiker999
I got to this article via RSS. Using Start.me to organize a lovely page full
of feeds.

~~~
jpkeisala
Thanks for start.me. I just registered. I forgot these kind of portals still
exist. I used to have netvibes.com but for some reason I stopped using it. I
will give another try with Start.me.

------
hprotagonist
No, i use RSS every day to read HN, among 163 other things.

~~~
taborj
Same here. Found this HN item via RSS.

Recently switched to FreshRSS (from tt-rss), running on my own system. I very
much prefer sites that provide an RSS feed, or that can be made to have one
with something like RSS-Bridge.

------
Thorentis
To the average consumer: yes. Why? Almost all news sites, blogs, journalists,
etc. use Facebook pages and other social media as "RSS feeds" for their own
websites. When people "like" a Facebook page or "follow" a Twitter account,
they are basically adding that outlet to their RSS feed. And when they scroll
through Facebook or Twitter, they are consuming that feed.

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.

------
erikrothoff
We’re working full time on [https://feeder.co](https://feeder.co) and growing
MRR every month. Does the average consumer know what RSS is? No. Will it
become the next Twitter anytime soon? Probably not. Is there a need for
managing news outside of your e-mail inbox, our usage data definitely shows
yes. Is the market ultra saturated? You betcha!

That said we’re eager to help grow the space. Would love to know if HN has any
ideas or feedback on this.

------
IronWolve
I love RSS, using IFTTT tools, I can automate and share different feeds to
other different sites, populating and share information from static portals. I
can even make RSS feeds from sites that dont offer native RSS.

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.

------
tgiba
Nobody saw anything wrong in RSS until Google Reader came along, then everyone
started using the reader, then content creators realized that GR is stealing
thunder and started dropping RSS, and then GR died and we ended up with no
Reader and no RSS.

It's certainly not dead, but it's not as popular as it used to be.

------
Multicomp
I used Live Bookmarks (powered by RSS) to get to this post. I hope not!

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.

------
undefined-1
I think there is hope. Ask sites for RSS feeds (especially podcasts, which
often forget to link to the RSS feeds). Build interesting new things with it
that inspire other people to build things with it. Convince browsers to make
RSS friendlier. Mozilla should have Firefox at least tell people what do with
RSS when they click the button instead of downloading a raw XML file: "you
clicked an RSS feed -- would you like to download this extension to read it?"

------
nergal
I wrote a rss/atom reader just a few months ago. I use it every day. Fully
open sourced and written in Golang.

[https://github.com/Lallassu/gorss](https://github.com/Lallassu/gorss)

------
Scottn1
I have used RSS daily for longer than I can accurately say. Since at least
when Opera had a built in RSS client. When Google Reader died I switched to
[https://g2reader.com](https://g2reader.com) and have been using that daily
since.

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.

~~~
hkt
I'm 30 and know 20 year olds using it. It is invaluable to them and to me. Not
everyone is a social media junkie.

------
ksec
Google Reader literally killed all Web and Clients side RSS development. It
make sense it lives on the web rather than an App. And it was one of the best
RSS Reader.

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.

~~~
jamesgeck0
> I am not sure what RSS Reader people are using these days

Reeder is the best RSS application I've seen. I sync it with Feedly on macOS
and iOS. Vienna RSS is another solid (open source!) option on mac, although
the UI isn't as nice as Reeder.

Linux users have FeedReader, which seems pretty great.

I haven't found a client I love on Windows. There's a lot of abandoned
applications that look and feel a few decades old.

------
smkellat
RSS powers podcasts. 110+ feeds in my feed reader come from extremely diverse
sources. It isn’t dead yet.

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...

------
jdofaz
My feed reader app is my go to app when I'm bored. I will say its becoming
less prominent. Half the time I want to add a site I have to guess where rss
feed is generated since its less common to link to it. Apple makes the
experience worse on iOS since rss link open in the News app but it doesn't
support rss.

Some new sites don't have it at all, when
[https://www.thefarside.com/](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.

------
knorker
I hope not, or I'll never read a single web comic, photo journal, or blog ever
again, including corporate blogs.

------
ctas
RSS/Atom still has its place and for many is still the favorite way to
subscribe to content on the internet. I built my own feed reader just a few
months ago. On top of it I added a simple recommendation algorithm based on
statistics of my reading behavior and article topics. I prefer the simplicity
and accessibility of RSS. The standard itself plays more or less a secondary
role nowadays. The various feed readers building on top it are still
innovating and still attract new users.

------
robobro
It takes like 20 seconds to add an Rss feed to whatever feed generator
software you've been writing. For the love of God please take those 20 seconds
to help people like us！

------
artembugara
2 weeks ago, I released a Python package (700+ stars on GitHub) that
"automagically scrapes" the last news from more than 3k news sources. You just
have to provide the base form of URL.

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.

GitHub:
[https://github.com/kotartemiy/newscatcher](https://github.com/kotartemiy/newscatcher)

------
PaulHoule
If the European countries want to see competition in social media they ought
to require that platforms support open protocols such as RSS, XMPP, SIP, etc.

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.

------
kickscondor
I've recently released a new type of reader:
[https://fraidyc.at/](https://fraidyc.at/)

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.

~~~
Jaruzel
Thats very confident colour scheme you've got going on there. :)

------
INTPenis
I think I sort of take my internet access for granted. Because I never use RSS
since at any time I can open a browser or an app and get the news.

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.

~~~
smabie
Or 3) People who have realized that clicking around on different sites for
news is a massive waste of time compared to having the news come to you.

------
pipework
RSS is not dead, but it's not cool to ship RSS clients in new projects. It's
consumed far and wide, both directly and indirectly from readers, leechers,
and listeners; it's used inside products and projects ranging from enterprise
to mom-and-pop shops.

Do I need a list? Nah. If I did, it'd be more telling about me than RSS
anyways.

------
mkchoi212
Absolutely not! I use Reeder on the Mac to keep up with my favorite blogs, and
most of them (I’d say 90%) support RSS.

------
xs
No. My entire business is based on RSS. And it's doing great. I'm a podcaster.
All podcasts are RSS feeds.

------
timw4mail
Every site that removes RSS is dead to me.

------
slightwinder
No, it's just unpopular with mainstream-users, and kinda dying for
newssources. As a format there seems to be not much improvment done in the
last decade, as an ecosystem there are always new clients and libs, but no
innovation is done IMHO, it's always the same set of features being
implemented. As a longtime user of at least 15+ years now I've seen some
strong dying of feeds in the last years, To the point that I'm thinking now
aboubt alternative ways to scrap data from my sources. I think most existing
feeds are more a case of legacy code in popular frameworks. Also, there are
many new sources growing which are build without RSS for commercial reasons.
So having alternative source-scrapers is a neccessary anyway.

------
timw4mail
Part of the problem with RSS feeds is that they have to be found more often
than not.

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)

------
adeltoso
RSS is still alive but maybe not as a direct data source, still it can be
super useful. Less than 24 hours ago it let me give access to a daily report
to anyone via email (registration at the bottom here
[https://nichecommerce.net/reports/daily_ecommerce_pulse/2020...](https://nichecommerce.net/reports/daily_ecommerce_pulse/2020/03/05/#emailsub)
RSS:
[https://nichecommerce.net/latest/feed/](https://nichecommerce.net/latest/feed/)
\- MailService: mailerlite.com)

------
Arkanosis
Using it daily… reading 300+ titles and around 50 full articles every day of
the year… Definitely not dead for me. I can't even imagine how I'd read as
much /interesting/ content in as little time without RSS.

~~~
drpixie
Similar, so RSS is not dead, despite google's best efforts $#%%###!!

------
reportingsjr
Nope! I use newsblur and it is absolutely fantastic on web/mobile/whatever.

------
tschellenbach
I still read my news in my Winds RSS reader, put in quite a few commits to it
as well:
[https://github.com/GetStream/winds](https://github.com/GetStream/winds)

------
JohnFen
I hope not! I use it rather heavily, every day.

------
rcarmo
No. I read HN through RSS, as well as around 200 other sites. I would never be
bothered to check them all manually, and this affords me a much higher signal
to noise ratio over a much shorter period of time.

There simply is no substitute.

------
toyg
Rss / Atom is not dead, but it has become part of B2B stacks rather than being
a standalone B2C format. Considering it’s XML, it was somewhat naive (in
retrospect) to hope for anything different.

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.

------
hkt
No, I use it every day. There isn't an alternative to subscribe to lots of
feeds of specialist things. It's a great tool for anybody who needs to
supplement regular journalistic output with

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.

------
Groxx
Every interesting blog I run across hosts an RSS feed of some kind too, with
only 1 or 2 exceptions in... almost 5 years?

Not dead. Absurdly useful. Quite possibly niche, but is it a niche of valuable
users? Maybe.

------
foxfired
The reason RSS is not dead is because it is relatively free. The people who
don't want it on their website remove the RSS button from their list of share-
buttons. They have no clue that their website still supports it.

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:

    
    
        <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="vice" href="http..redacted..."/>

------
webwanderings
I use this, works perfectly fine on daily/frequent basis (not dead):
[https://feedreader.com/online](https://feedreader.com/online)

------
kwood
I'm currently writing a new client for RSS, which is dead. Framework of choice
is Rails - which is also dead.

This thread inspires me to pull in some jQuery and change the project name to
Graveyard.

~~~
Jaruzel
+1 for the name Graveyard. :)

------
BillFranklin
I wrote a fast feed aggregator a couple months ago. I’ve found I’ve read HN
less because of it, and have read more of what I’m interested in. RSS feeds
are fantastic, could still be improved though (eg pagination of feeds).

[https://www.bilbof.com/following](https://www.bilbof.com/following)

It’s open source if you want to run your own:
[https://github.com/bilbof/feed](https://github.com/bilbof/feed)

------
dzsekijo
I do use Facebook to get at news but that's a feed someone else (well, an AI)
curated for me.

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).

------
hs86
I am currently using Feedly with their recent "Leo" feature and it is really
interesting how well it works.

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/](https://blog.feedly.com/leo/)

Innovation in the RSS space is still happening and therefore I wouldn't call
it 'dead'.

------
nreece
RSS feeds aren't dead. On the contrary, their usage for content aggregation,
media monitoring and podcasts has increased in the past few years, specially
by power users (inforvores) and in the business world.

Speaking from my own experience running Feedity -
[https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com), a growing service that helps with
custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages.

~~~
dahx4Eev
Does feedity allow me to generate an RSS feed for sites that do not provide
it?

~~~
nreece
Yes, for almost any public webpage.

------
boastful_inaba
Hey, I'm trying to revive it somewhat! You Need Feeds is my attempt to create
an explainer and RSS promo page. (I admit the copy and design needs a refresh,
and I still haven't done a proper Android page...)
[https://www.youneedfeeds.com/](https://www.youneedfeeds.com/) Suggestions
welcome...

------
gnuarch
Feed reader support for JSONFeed (Brent Simmons and Manton Reece,
jsonfeed.org) is quite unclear at the moment; maybe only iOS Reeder apart from
NetNewsWire?

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.

------
diablo1
It's only dead insofar as most blogs don't have a decent RSS feed to begin
with. I've scoured the web looking for high quality RSS feeds that are updated
regularly, and have even shared an OPML file with close friends who happen to
really like RSS too. The amount of effort was astonishing gathering those RSS
feeds, but it was worth it.

~~~
totaldude87
care to list a few?!

~~~
diablo1
No, but if you look around Hackernews there are plenty of blogs that have a
high quality RSS feed. I'm not sharing my own personal preferences on here
with others for privacy reasons. By high quality, I mean the content is
exceptional and not blogspam and the content is updated regularly. Bonus
points if the RSS feed is not a list of 'summaries' and includes the full
content of each post. Even more bonus points if the feed doesn't have ADs and
'share this on Facebook' links :)

~~~
smabie
Privacy reasons? You created your account 3 days ago and have a couple posts.
Moreover, I don’t understand how mentioning blogs hurts your privacy.

~~~
diablo1
Yes. Privacy reasons. Sometimes privacy is about consent, and I do not consent
to sharing the blogs that I follow.

------
AdmiralAsshat
No, but I certainly don't find it as useful as it used to be. Used to be able
to add newsfeeds to an RSS feeder and actually be able to _read_ the news. Now
the ticker is just the headline or one-to-two sentences, with a URL to the
full article. Why bother with a bloody RSS feed if I'm gonna have to open my
browser anyway?

~~~
listenallyall
For most sites, BazQux Reader (in my opinion, the absolute best RSS reader),
can pull in the entire article even if the RSS feed only provides a headline
or abbreviated version.

------
davepeck
I wrote an thing a couple years back.
[https://davepeck.org/2018/08/16/revisiting-
rss/](https://davepeck.org/2018/08/16/revisiting-rss/) \-- for me, anyway, RSS
is still a key part of my daily work and leisure.

------
copperfitting1
I use Feedly myself which pulls in articles via RSS. I even got into this
thread with an RSS link. Frankly, it's a great resource to keep up with
different blogs and sites without having them all live in your bookmarks bar.

------
NicoJuicy
Almost everyone probably already has a rss client at work. It's called
Outlook.

------
zikani_03
No way! I use The Old Reader and it's a great way to kinda deal with FOMO;
having feeds in one place from various outlets. It's only annoying when some
news sites don't have RSS/Atom feeds.. meh

------
ioseph
At my work we considered removing the RSS functionality, a quick analysis
showed it fed a whole bunch of apps both internal and external. It's
definitely alive and heavily used just not as much by humans

------
derefr
Keep in mind, the goal of RSS is and always was to serve as a sort of _shim_
between the simplest, most static of websites (the ones that live an entirely-
static life, which don't run code during the rendering lifecycle, and
therefore which can't call out to tell anyone about their new content) and
users (who want to receive a notification or message somehow anyway.)

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.)

------
mc3
I'd really prefer RSS instead of marketing emails I choose to opt in to. An
email feels like a todo, a stressor! An RSS feed feels like a "to read at
lesiure" stream.

------
void_nill
I've given up RSS. Until the end of the year 2019 I still had a RSS.xml file
which I updated by hand, but eventually I got too much work. The main reason
was not that RSS is "dead" but the old and cumbersome syntax. I cannot get
used to XML. Another reason is that browsers have started not to support RSS
anymore. I have never used a reader, but rather read RSS in the browser than
some kind of minimalist blog. It is difficult to say if RSS is dead, but I
have the "subjective" feeling that less and less people implement RSS in their
projects. In my opinion, RSS should be completely revised, not only in concept
but also in syntax.

------
wooque
Nope, I'm still using it.

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.

------
ninedays
> then content creators realized that GR is stealing thunder and started
> dropping RSS, and then GR died and we ended up with no Reader and no RSS.

Funny how anyone can define History.

------
johnmarcus
In my experience, the rss feed of so many blog sights is often so broken that
it makes it challenging to use, and Soni abondon it every time I try to use it
meaningfully.

------
tree3
I don't think RSS will ever die because it takes little to no effort for a
content producer to provide it. It's as simple and straight forward as it
gets.

------
Zebfross
I personally use RSS on my website as a way to automatically publish to
various social media sites. It works great, and I don’t know what I would
replace it with.

------
arwhatever
RSS had better not die! It's my escape plan for keeping up with the software
industry once Twitter becomes too obnoxious to bear any longer.

------
kmstout
I've used RSS in some form for several years. I've lately gotten quite a bit
of use from rss2email, some .forward rules, and mutt.

------
caseyf7
I just got back into it in February thanks to the Reeder iPad app. It helps
you grab the RSS feeds even if the site doesn’t post a link.

------
dazsnow
Came here from my rss feed. So I sure hope not...

------
moltar
I got this post on HN via RSS via Reeder app.

Conclusion: not dead.

~~~
smabie
“I read this post on Mac OS 9. Conclusion: not dead”

Unless you’re using a pedantic and useless definition of dead (a bad faith
interpretation, I would argue), your statement doesn’t make much sense.

------
strzibny
Someone asked me for my RSS feed last week. I have it, but did not promote it
at all. I guess RSS is not dead yet.

------
Andrew_nenakhov
I came to comment on this post after receiving notification in my RSS reader.
So I say this:

 _Pretty lively dead standard!_

------
mikorym
This is like when someone asked on Reddit whether Ubuntu Studio is dead.

No, it's not dead. Use it if you want to.

Here be no adverts.

------
nikki-9696
I hope not. It's how I get most of my news and follow sites. Feedly is my
friend.

------
elFarto
I still use it for all of my Youtube subscriptions. I have about 50 channels
in there.

~~~
emsign
yep me too. yt's subscription page becomes really cluttered once your channel
count is that high. so I prefer to check them in a rss reader

------
k1m
If anyone comes across a site witout an RSS feed, try Feed Creator -
[http://createfeed.fivefilters.org](http://createfeed.fivefilters.org) \-
It'll let you target a set of links or other HTML elements to be turned into a
feed. (I developed this.)

------
tacone
Also, we miss you Aaron. <3

------
birdyrooster
NZB and Torrent indexers often publish RSS and works great. Definitely not
dead.

------
sam_lowry_
Nope, I read HN through RSS.

------
craze3
Do we really need a new thread about this thread every month? :)

------
einpoklum
RSS is what got me to this post, so not quite dead yet I guess.

------
bert2002
Still using RSS and Feedly! Perfect to get passive information.

------
jillesvangurp
It still exists but awareness that it exists is at an all time low with both
users, web developers, and SEO specialists.

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).

------
jasonboyd
If RSS is dead then I am reading this from the great beyond.

------
jpswade
What purpose do RSS feeds have in a world of news feeds?

------
zelon88
RSS is one of the primary ways I read HN.

------
allard
it's not dead, it just smells funny

------
jbj
still use it for podcasts, butgetting increasingly more troublesome to track
down for new podcasts

------
jinushaun
No. I saw this post via RSS

------
gorbachev
No.

------
altmind
no

this feels like almost "is rss dead" spam

------
hfdh434535
RSS was never really alive to begin with.

------
xorzarle
Well, I used RSS to find this comment....

------
jsilence
No.

------
sys_64738
No

------
o_p
Deprecated.

------
senectus1
oh its that time of the year again? already?

No. RSS isnt dead. I got this link FROM RSS.

