RSS Didn't Die, The Open Web Just Got Quiet

The standard story is that RSS died in 2013 when Google Reader shut down. It’s a tidy story, and it’s wrong. RSS didn’t die, it went infrastructural. It stopped being a product you opened and became plumbing you never see.

Where it actually went

Look at what runs on feeds today:

• Every podcast. The entire podcast ecosystem is RSS. When you subscribe in any app, you’re subscribing to a feed. A multi-billion-dollar medium quietly standardized on a format from 1999.
• The fediverse. Mastodon and friends expose feeds, and the whole model, follow a source, get its updates in your own client, is the RSS idea wearing new clothes.
• Newsletters. The newsletter boom is the reader-in-your-inbox pattern that RMail was doing here in 2005. Same need, different delivery.

Why “dead” stuck anyway

RSS lost the thing that makes technologies feel alive: a consumer product with a logo. Google Reader was the face, and when the face went away, people assumed the body had too. But a feed is a boring, durable contract, “here is my content as structured XML, poll it when you like”, and boring durable contracts are exactly what survive.

The open web didn’t lose. It just stopped advertising.

Getting back into feeds

Starting again is easy. Pick a feed reader, then add the sources you actually want, a few blogs, a newsletter or two, a podcast. Most sites still publish a feed even when they don’t advertise it, and readers can auto-discover it from a tag in the page. Within a week you have a calm, chronological stream of exactly the sources you chose and nothing else: no ranking, no “suggested for you,” no outrage bait engineered to keep you scrolling. It is the antidote to the feed you didn’t pick.

Why it matters now

The case for feeds is stronger in 2026 than it was in 2013. The alternative, algorithmic timelines you don’t control, content you can only reach inside one app, has shown its costs. A feed is a standing offer of portable, un-gatekept, chronological access to a source you chose. No ranking, no engagement farming, no lock-in. Subscribe, and the source comes to you on your terms.

That’s why KB Cafe keeps a Feeds section. Not nostalgia, a bet that the open web’s quietest format is also one of its most resilient.

Related

New here? Read what RSS actually is, see the feed tools, or how feeds feed AI.