Post B5y7gEogfKW8gRpSmO by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
 (DIR) More posts by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
 (DIR) Post #B5y7gCgoZd225S89EO by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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       I find it such a weird meme that RSS/Atom is dead. Literally every blogging platform has RSS/Atom support. Not just the "indie" ones, even the big corporate ones, like Substack and Medium. Every mastodon account has a built-in RSS feed. Every Bluesky account has a built-in RSS feed. Almost every major news site has an RSS or Atom feed. WordPress automatically produces RSS feeds (and WordPress powers almost half the Web).RSS and Atom are almost certainly even more ubiquitous than they were in the 2000s, if only because the web has gotten so much bigger than it was back then.There are more podcasts now than there ever have been, and each of these has an RSS feed. Every fucking YouTube channel has an RSS feed. In 2005 there were probably fewer than 20 million blogs. Right now there are more than a hundred million YouTube channels.RSS/Atom is bigger than ever.
       
 (DIR) Post #B5y7gDWZTCQqfyLTu4 by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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       The only thing that died was Google Reader, and that didn't come close to "taking down RSS". Today there are more options for reading and authoring RSS/Atom feeds than there ever were in the past.  We've never had this many good apps and services in the RSS/Atom ecosystem.I think there were some really interesting aspects of Google Reader that I do regret losing. But it's just so weird to hear people  say things like "Ahh yes, RSS, that was a very elegant thing, I'm nostalgic for the days when we had that..." It's like being nostalgic for the good old days when the sun used to go up in the morning and come down in the evening. It's still doing that!
       
 (DIR) Post #B5y7gEogfKW8gRpSmO by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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       The other thing that died, I guess, was the enthusiasm in the Big Web industry to jam RSS everywhere. There was a lot of weird hype back in those days, and for some reason people thought they could make money from it. Of course, the reality was the opposite: RSS empowers the *operators* of Internet-capable devices, rather than the parasites who try to extract money from the Web. That is why the weird hype died and megacorporations stopped making weird announcements about how they are transforming everything with RSS. But that stuff was never the soul of it, and it didn't matter at all.