RSS Is Not Dead

Every few years someone writes "RSS is dead" and a hundred people write "RSS is not dead." The cycle repeats because both statements contain truth. RSS the format is not going anywhere. RSS the market share is negligible. RSS the cultural force is alive and growing among the specific people who never stopped believing in it.

These people were right all along.

The Great Algorithm Flip

RSS died the day the algorithm was born. When Facebook introduced the algorithmic feed in 2009, when Twitter switched from chronological to algorithmic in 2016, when every social network discovered that engagement metrics could be optimized by deciding what users saw instead of showing them what they followed, RSS became irrelevant to most people. Why bother checking multiple feeds when one algorithm could curate everything for you?

The answer turned out to be: because the algorithm does not want you to win. It wants you to stay, to scroll, to engage, to despair, to outrage, to compare. An algorithm is not a neutral delivery mechanism. It is a business model. You are not the customer. You are the inventory being sold to advertisers.

RSS makes no money. It serves no ads. It cannot be optimized. It simply gets you what you subscribed to, in the order it was published, without inference or intervention. For a venture-funded platform chasing growth and engagement, RSS is useless. For a person trying to actually stay informed, RSS is indispensable.

The People Who Never Stopped

The RSS renaissance is not a sudden trend. It is the visible emergence of something that never went away. There have always been people who run local RSS readers, who check feeds first thing in the morning, who treat the open web as a library to be navigated deliberately instead of a slot machine to be played passively.

Most of these people work in technology or publishing. They tend to run their own infrastructure. They have opinions about data portability and open standards. They remember when there was a meaningful distinction between "publishers" and "platforms," and they have no patience for the pretense that YouTube or TikTok is anything other than a gatekeeper.

The technical barriers to RSS have also dropped. Feedly is elegant. NetNewsWire is free and good. Substack feeds RSS as a matter of course. You can check RSS in many places now without needing to know what RSS is, which means people who abandoned it years ago are quietly rediscovering it without necessarily realizing that what they are doing is checking feeds.

But the deeper shift is philosophical. After years of watching platforms manipulate discourse, suppress reach, change features without consent, and sell access to algorithmic prominence, people are rediscovering the appeal of a system where they control the input. The algorithm cannot surprise you because there is no algorithm. The platform cannot shadow-ban you because there is no platform. Your feed contains exactly what you subscribed to, and nothing more.

This is not sexy. It does not generate engagement. It does not create the feeling of infinite discovery. But it also does not waste your time, and in 2026 that has become the most radical proposition the internet can offer.

What RSS Actually Is

For people who have only ever known algorithmic feeds, RSS seems quaint or technical. It is actually both simpler and more radical than any algorithm ever created.

RSS is a format: a way of packaging a feed of content so that it can be read by anything. A blog publishes an RSS feed. A reader subscribes to that feed. When new posts appear on the blog, they appear in the reader. That is all. No middleman. No recommendation engine. No engagement metrics. Just publisher to reader, as many times as many people want to read it.

This is such a straightforward idea that it feels obvious in retrospect. Yet every social network currently operates on the assumption that the network, not the reader, should decide what the reader sees. RSS says: no, the reader decides what the reader sees. The reader is sovereign.

This should have been the default. It would have been the default if not for the discovery of infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendation, and infinite growth as business models. RSS stayed true to the original logic of the web: publishers publish, readers read, and readers own their attention.

The Ecosystem

The renaissance has already happened in some circles. Substack's growth has been partly driven by an audience tired of platforms and eager to subscribe directly to writers they trust. Ghost, which is explicitly RSS-first in its design, has attracted publishers building things that are not beholden to algorithmic whimsy. Independent blogs, which were declared dead years ago, have experienced a genuine resurgence, particularly among writers tired of Twitter's chaos or Medium's algorithm.

The podcast ecosystem has always been RSS. Every podcast you listen to exists because someone published an RSS feed and every podcast app reads that RSS feed. Podcasting has never had a centralized algorithm. The closest thing to a recommendation engine is Spotify, which owns it and manipulates it. Most podcast listeners use apps, and most apps are reading open RSS feeds, and most podcast listeners have never heard the phrase "RSS feed" and do not care. They just subscribe to podcasts and listen to them.

This is what maturity looks like. The format works so well that it is invisible.

How phreak.fm Breathes

This site itself is built on RSS. The entire Frequencies vertical, which aggregates electronic music releases and reviews, reads RSS feeds from labels, publications, and artists who publish them. The Static vertical that publishes commentary and essays occasionally surfaces links and stories from feeds. The architecture depends on a simple principle: if something is worth reading and someone published it openly, it should be findable without needing an algorithm to tell you it exists.

This was not a trendy choice. It was a structural choice made because RSS is older than most social platforms, more reliable than most social platforms, and more honest than most social platforms. A feed reader is not trying to make you feel a specific way. It is not trying to keep you on the site for one more scroll. It is trying to get you where you want to go and then leave you alone.

That honesty is becoming rare enough to be notable.

The Long Future

The big social networks will not disappear. Instagram will not collapse because RSS exists. Twitter will not lose its audience to feed readers. The algorithm is not going anywhere because the algorithm is profitable, and profitability is the only thing that scales in Silicon Valley.

But the algorithm is also increasingly terrible in ways that people feel viscerally. The constant algorithmic intervention. The recommendations that miss the mark. The sense that the platform is working against you even when it is pretending to work for you. The fatigue of knowing that nothing you see is chronological, everything is filtered, and the filters are tuned for someone else's benefit.

Some people will opt out. They will start reading RSS feeds. They will not post on social media. They will send emails. They will build personal websites. They will turn the internet back into something personal and small, and they will do it using tools and formats that are older than the companies that killed the open web.

RSS is not a revolution. It is a return. The people who never stopped using it were not wrong about what matters. They were just premature. The resurrection is happening slowly, quietly, without announcement, the way the best internet things always do.

The feed is there. All you have to do is subscribe.