Every so often someone declares a feed technology dead, usually because a large company stopped supporting it. The technology in question carries on regardless, because it does not depend on any large company. RSS, the simple format that lets a site publish a machine-readable list of what it has recently published, is a case study in how open standards outlive the products built on top of them.
What it does
An RSS feed is a file. It lists a site’s recent items with a title, a link, a date and usually a summary or the full text. A reader application fetches that file periodically from every site you follow and shows you what is new, in the order it was published, with nothing hidden and nothing promoted.
That is the whole feature, and it is the opposite of a modern feed in almost every respect. There is no ranking. There is no engagement metric deciding what you see. There is no platform between the publisher and the reader. If you subscribe to a site, you see what it publishes, and if you unsubscribe, it stops.
Why it faded
RSS lost its mainstream moment for ordinary reasons. It required a separate app and a little setup. Social platforms offered discovery as well as following, and discovery is what most people wanted most of the time. Publishers found that social distribution reached more people, even if it reached them less reliably. And the format itself was never a product with a marketing budget; nobody’s revenue depended on you knowing it existed.
Why it is back
Three things changed. Platform feeds became noticeably worse at showing people what they had asked to see, and the reasons became widely understood. Podcasts, which run entirely on RSS, became one of the largest media categories in the world, demonstrating that the model scales. And a new generation of reader apps made subscribing as easy as pasting a link, with polished interfaces that no longer feel like a developer tool.
There is also a quieter driver. Anyone building a tool that needs to know what a site has published, whether that is a search engine, a research project, an archive or an assistant, uses feeds if they exist. A site with a good feed is a site that participates in the wider web. A site without one is a site that can only be reached through whichever platform happens to be ascendant.
What a good feed looks like
Full text rather than truncated teasers, so that reading does not require a click-through. Correct dates, so items appear in order. A stable link per item. Enclosures for media, so that audio and video feeds work in podcast apps. Category feeds for readers who want one subject and not the others. And a link in the page’s head so that reader apps find the feed automatically.
None of this is difficult. It is simply a matter of treating the feed as part of the publication rather than a legacy checkbox.
Where OCXLY stands
This site publishes a full feed and category feeds, and the video and audio sections have their own. If you would rather follow us through a reader than through a platform, that is exactly what they are for. The open web is not a nostalgia project. It is the part of the internet that still works the same way regardless of who owns it this year.
