There sure seems to be a lot of RSS-related stuff going around recently. I’ve seen some interesting articles and even new software being released. First up, NetNewsWire: I mentioned about a month ago that NNW just turned 23 years old, and its 7.0 release has a fresh, Liquid Glass update. (And there’s an even more recent release updated for older OSes for the anti-Tahoe crowd.) Good stuff from a venerable RSS citizen.
I can’t remember the order I came across these other bits in, so I’ll just start with…
I read a lot on the web. I almost never look at websites, though. I consume almost everything through an RSS reader. As AI reshapes the way online information is organised and consumed, it increasingly feels like I’m behind the scenes, watching the performance from the wings rather than seeing it from the front as intended. I thought I’d tell you why I do this and what it looks like.
I enjoyed this look at RSS through someone else’s eyes, especially someone who relies on it so heavily for their work.
The View From RSS
What the web looks like when you subscribe to 2,000 RSS feeds.
I’ve only noticed a site putting out RSS-only content for search engine optimization a few times, and it was always Outside properties, like Pinkbike. They would put an article on Pinkbike that was only a title and a link to other Outside articles on other sites. Pretty lame.
I saw this article being discussed on Hacker News, and I got a fun dose of TIL in the comments there:
“Reddit also has RSS feeds, add `.rss` to urls.”
Neat!
Cory Doctorow, blogging about “Personal Disenshittification”:
For more than a decade, RSS has lain dormant. Many, many websites still emit RSS feeds. It’s a default behavior for WordPress sites, for Ghost and Substack sites, for Tumblr and Medium, for Bluesky and Mastodon. You can follow edits to Wikipedia pages by RSS, and also updates to parcels that have been shipped to you through major couriers. Web builders like Jason Kottke continue to surface RSS feeds for elaborate, delightful blogrolls:
I disagree that it’s been dormant, but it certainly hasn’t been mainstream for quite some time. I’ll agree with him that it “continues to be a power user-coded niche”. But let’s not let that Kottke link go by unexamined: it’s a pretty nice take on a blogroll that includes the most recent posts in the listing. He explained it when he introduced it here:
The KDO Rolodex Is Now a Wee Feed Reader?
Hello, good afternoon! As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have a bunch of new stuff for KDO in the pipeline. I’ve been focused on backend infrastructure recently
And Manton Reece of Micro.blog, who has been a consistent proponent of RSS, introduced a new feed reader yesterday, Inkwell.
Manton Reece - Introducing Inkwell
There have been others too! It might be too early to declare an RSS renaissance, but this flurry of activity is a good sign.