The death of social media is the renaissance of RSS (2025)
smartlab.at146 points by jruohonen 6 hours ago
146 points by jruohonen 6 hours ago
Every article that I’ve read in the last 5 years about the RSS revival has a big section explaining what is RSS.
And that’s the answer about RSS renaissance. If you have to explain it, there is zero chance of massive adoption.
My take on the RSS-renaissance chestnut: The original sin is the name. Only clueless nerds could come up with such a soporific, opaque, geeky moniker as "RSS". It should have been called "Webfeed". Then there would be no explaining to do.
Sure, naming is important, but the RSS icon was well known. It was part of the Firefox address bar.
This is a great point. Maybe we can start now?
Apparently is is called web feed, although I never have heard this until I searched off the back of your comment[0].
Apparently, web feed also encompasses Atom and JSON feed as well as RSS, which is probably more in the spirit of how people actually say "RSS".
> If you have to explain it, there is zero chance of massive adoption.
Here's the thing, one should not need to explain it no mire. Devices or applications accessing content with an RSS option should present it to the end user through a convenient interface.
I'm happily using RSS despite you needing an explanation. Funny how that works.
It just needs to be described in a more concrete way to people. Such as, You know how the podcasts you listen to keep getting updated on your phone? That's RSS. Imagine if other things you liked turned up when they were new and you had a lot of control over that process.
Most non-tech people I know listen to podcasts through Spotify and some think Spotify invented them.
Looking how podcasts advertise themselves, those who do use RSS advertise "Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app" here.
It's been the absolute worst thing for 10+ years that some podcasts have adverts, even their own website, but somehow fail to provide the RSS feed link anywhere - only app specific links for the biggest 2.
You also have people producing "podcasts" that only exist on youtube.
I’ve left social networks behind and returned to RSS, and I couldn't be happier. I’m using Delta Chat as an interface with FeedsBot, so the whole setup feels just like Telegram channels, but without Pavel Durov reading everything. It’s been a great experience so far.
If you count Podcasts as RSS then surely RSS is more popular than ever. I can imagine that if Apple bundled a hypertext version of the Podcasts app it would be similarly popular. But they won't because it would compete with their own News+ subscriptions.
I still mourn the loss of Google Reader.
There are plenty of RSS reader apps, but there are very few with good cross-device sync - let alone self-hosted cross-device sync.
I've been using one of the numerous "RSS to Email" programs for the past 20 years.
To me that's peak usability, I can use my mail workflow to have cross-device state, I can use my mail clients tagging and spam support to filter, and I have a reasonably good searching facility too.
Some sites only include "teasers" rather than full posts, but they're a minority.
I don't think you could self-host Google Reader, so it sort of feels like these two sentences don't hang together.
It's more linked to there not being any / many high quality RSS reader applications, so the comment is talking about a feature, so it does make sense.
I've been using Feedly ever since the death of Google Reader. If you ignore all the ai bullshit it's simple to use and I've had no issues with cross-device sync.
This just won’t work. If RSS becomes popular, there will be discovery platforms with “algorithm”s. It will be the same thing, just the discovery and content separated.
RSS appears good now only because it’s not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with. I don’t use RSS, so I don’t really mind, but those who use RSS are making disservice to its _purity_ by trying to popularize it.
RSS is just one element of the ecosystem - the input.
I envision that the filtering mechanism CAN use any rules - hand-written, heuristics, old-school machine learning, LLMs. Just with a key difference - you are the one controlling it. No hidden tricks to make you "engaged" (read: addicted) or "sold".
If you feel it is too much politics, you reduce it. If too little - add. If you want less clickbaits and intellectual fast food, you filter it. Etc, etc.
> it’s not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with
About that, I was sad to see that TDMRep [1] doesn't provide a way to signal reservation for RSS feed, so it has to be done at the HTTP level, otherwise the same content delivered in RSS feed can be legitimately scrapped and mined even if the author opted-out using an HTML meta tag on the website.
> there will be discovery platforms with “algorithm”s.
We already have platforms like feedly that has optional AI curated feeds.
> If RSS becomes popular, there will be discovery platforms with “algorithm”s.
So? If plain RSS exists, then you can still consume it the way you want.
I'd like to remind that when RSS was really popular we had "planet" aggregators everywhere, where someone interested in particular topic bundled posts from multiple people.
RSS exists but those authors who don't publish through it probably wouldn't care about it either. Like, if by magic, RSS became popular as a technology, they would publish through it, but then there would be demand for discoverability and algo feeds would win the engagement race and then RSS is in the background and th platform would naturally decide to just focus on the algo and drop RSS and the regular users wouldn't care and authors would only care what regular users care about. Except for the tiny techie bubble.
It's not a technical problem. Less effort will always be more popular and drown out more effort in the mainstream.
Imagine if you could order completely free McDonald's food to your doorstep anytime and could also choose to cook your meals at home. Guess what portion of people would choose which option.
recently I had a thought that the AI revolution will actually be a good thing for the web.
it kills SEO advertising. someone writing an article for the purpose of ranking high and making money off of clicks doesnt get clicks anymore because of AI summaries.
direct content-to-ad-revenue is dead. Either you're a hobbyist and write for the heck of it - so your writing will be honest and better quality. Or, you're a product vendor and your writing is documentation meant to be found by AI summaries, again - that's honest.
Once profit is gone, love is all left.
If the AI people win, there will be no human audience for your writing. I don't think people will write simply to benefit someone else's subscription-funded service.
Boy I hope so. I miss my RSS reader. I'd love to see one made with the modern UX that makes the doomscrolling apps so engaging. (Or maybe I wouldn't.)
I'm reading this on Feeder, which a free RSS app I found on F-Droid. Works for me
I am pretty happy with Readwise’s Reader
yeah, Readwise is bloody great. Turns out if you want good software, it can help to pay for it.
I came here via NetNewsWire. iCloud sync is flakey but that's the only quibble. Oh, and you can't yet export starred articles unless you fiddle with SQL.
How can a human communication needs be replaced with something that is read-only?
the obvious problem with replacing the algorithm is that people actually crave that shit, after all there have been tens of thousands of highly trained engineers making it as addictive as possible. So, no chance.
Just like other addictions, people can choose to quit them.
I feel tiktok is slightly more difficult to drop than cigarettes.
Plug for feeeed: https://feeeed.nateparrott.com
It’s my primary hn reader now.
A good RSS extension for firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...
do you have any good sources for rss material? i self host miniflux but the difficult part is to find someting good and interesting. Any field is ok for me, i will then decide what to keep. Thanks
I'm no longer keeping it updated with new content, but I curated and made searchable about 40k feeds over the years https://blognerd.app/
The problem is that the majority of people who used to visit websites just ask LLMs nowadays. They don't visit the site itself, where the work origins from, so they also can't give back / support the source.
It's similar to the viewership of coding tutorials having sunk incredibly low these, creators, especially the ones creating high quality content, can't finance such work / content anymore.
> The problem is that the majority of people who used to visit websites just ask LLMs nowadays.
I truly do not believe this is the same type of topic. People visit websites and RSS feeds and writers they care about, and don't ask LLMs for this content. They ask LLMs for content that they don't care about those elements for.
If I want to know what Gruber thinks about iPhone whatever, I'm just going to check Daring Fireball. I'm not going to ask Claude what Gruber thinks.
Then charge for it. I happily pay for high quality services. I pay for Jetbrains editors, I pay for my email, I pay for LLM tokens, and I pay for Patreon subscriptions. Stop supporting content with advertising.
Can't wait to try some of the readers in this thread. I landed on inoreader not long after the Google reader died. The old reader wasn't doing what I needed back then. I've probably been using this a little too long without checking for what else is out there.
RSS is unfortunately just a technology for getting headlines from somewhere.
Doesn't fix the problem of discovering sources that aren't "AI" slop.
Also wondering if the article is "AI" slop or not. Seems a bit too verbose for me.
Very good article. I am not referring to the RSS part.
Interesting thing is, much of what AI is now regurgitating is human output, accumulated over the years. Model training dataset. Stuff like Reddit posts, even posts here?
If, say, AI output becomes THE 99% over the next few years, we will enter the era of incestuous inbreeding within AI -when it simply regurgitates its own output.
Wonder what will be the result at that point!
Just make valid robots.txt and sitemap.xml, please, so I can crawl and update mirrors of the sites I am interested in with least amount of impact on the site.
Sick and tired to be forced to see content from creators that I did't choose to follow, I switched to RSS as an aggregator and doom scrolling is suddenly interesting again.
when google reader died, I jumped to TheOldReader. it was great for a long time but has been having challenges lately and I jumped to the Vienna app on macos.
I fail to see how RSS helps filter out AI slop. Started a business based in RSS 20 years ago but that failed against Social Media slop.
I believe human validation protocols might help, think captcha enabled ping backs, but RSS I believe may have very little impact on its own
> I fail to see how RSS helps filter out AI slop.
Not sure if I'm missing something, but for AI slop to get into your RSS feed, you have to be following something with slop which can easily be unfollowed; this is unlike algorithmically driven recommendations where there is no direct filter from your end.
I think you’d just have to unfollow sources that publish AI slop. But that doesn’t seem too difficult with RSS, I can’t think of any source that sometimes publishes AI slop and sometimes I want to read their stuff. I guess if you tried to put an X feed in there, but I doubt you can do that now anyway.
Nah it’s just that the content consumers are now LLMs
Big if true
Someone said, “if you have to explain it, then you’ve already failed”. That’s basically the problem in a nutshell. It would be great to see someone build a service based on an open standard, but then you have no moat. Anyone else can come along and build the same service using the same format.
No one wants to make a bet like that, so they don’t. That’s why RSS doesn’t get pushed or used more often.
This whole article reeks of AI slop
I thought so too, but it's almost too insane to me to believe the author would use generative AI to talk about the death of social media due to the flood of slop from the very same generative AI. But only almost.
This, at best bullet talking points were fed to the prompt and given and output length restriction, it's padded to fit the space diluting the message to the point only an LLM can
I don't quite use "social media" per se, unless of course hackernews is part of it (which, kind of, is ... anything we can use other people can read or relate to, is kind of social, by definition. I think Facebook etc... tried to claim ownership over the term "social media", and I disagree with this notion). Having said that, I don't use or need RSS, so I don't think there will be a renaissance for RSS for most people.
I do agree that AI is killing tons of things right now. This monster must be stopped; it is worse than Skynet in that it really, really sucks. Things started to decay before AI took over, though - for instance, Google search has been garbage since years. It was useful before that.
I used to compare the decay of google search with how youtube search works. You search for, say, "ninja cats". You get some results about cats. Perhaps also ninjas. After like 10 or 20 results, you suddenly get other videos that are totally unrelated, but you may click on it. That's addictive design. People click on it suddenly when it is interesting to them - but this also takes them away from their original search. Something similar happened to google search. The UI is total crap, it shows semi-related videos (I don't want to watch videos when I search for a specific term), some ads for companies (Google is milking it here) and then also useless entries such as "other people searched for sick grannies instead, do you want to search for this as well" and similar UI-ruining components. Without ublock origin I'd be quite lost already - lo and behold, Google killed ublock origin because it threatened their business model (another reason to use ublock origin; we really need to get rid of Google. It is no longer a useful corporation - just greedy).
RSS only serves as a backbone of a product. There’s no commenting, summaries a sparse, i don’t even think there’s consistent posting dates.
These evangelists want to make it sound like all we need to do is get everyone on board with RSS and we’ll all just hold hands and share the web.
People don’t browse the web, there’s like 10 websites, that’s the whole internet.
Everything else is just asteroids and abandoned space stations.
There are so many cool asteroids with people on them though, you can find them here: https://kagi.com/smallweb/
except that it only allows summaries behind paywalls. in many cases you never get the full article
I just don't follow sites with paywalls using RSS, it's that simple.
If you have the key to the paywall, then you can create a feed hydrator to fetch the content to the feed.
Stop trying to make RSS happen again. It's not going to happen again.
I set it up a year or two ago. Now i ready 90 of articles and news through it.
Actually I would have agreed with you 2 years ago. But now working with AI so much, maybe RSS "is" just the thing we need for some of the distrobution.
I'd be happy if AI would disappear, but I quite agree with the prior comment - AI is awful but RSS isn't too terribly useful for many of us either. It depends on the individual of course, some people love using RSS feeds. I don't use them. I find RSS not useful.
RSS is dead because it’s backwards. It requires everyone you want to follow to implement it since that is the best we could do a decade ago.
We can do better than that: an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. You shouldn’t need someone else to comply with a protocol just to ingest their data.
I don’t get why people keep fantasizing about a system that gave consumers no control. Scrape the website directly. You decide what’s in the feed, not them.
> an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed.
An LLM can try to do that, yes. But LLMs are lossy compression. RSS feeds are accurate, predictable, and follow a pre-defined structure. Using LLMs to ingest data which can easily be turned into an parseable data structure seems strange: use the LLM to do the "next part" of the formula (comprehension, decision making, etc)
There is also LLMs.txt https://llmstxt.org/ eg https://joshua.hu/llms.txt / https://joshua.hu/llms-full.txt
I imagine a reasonably intelligent coding agent would notice that an RSS feed already exists and use it. Possibly transformed if it's not quite the format you want?
I was never an RSS user until half a year ago. Now that’s my only way of browsing my choice of (tech) news sources and blogs.