Irreal has considered RSS many times, especially since Google’s liquidation of RSS reader, There’s too many posts to cite here; just do a search for “RSS” on the Irreal site to see them. If you aren’t a silly person, you know that RSS hasn’t gone anywhere and is still helping the knowledgeable keep up with developing news, blog posts, and other interesting content.
Despite what you may have heard, Twitter has not replaced RSS. If you’re the type of person who thinks something significant can be said in 140 characters, it may have for you but the rest of us are happily using RSS daily to notify us of interesting content that we may want to examine.
Nikki Usher has a post that claims this is the year of RSS and that all we need is a new improved RSS reader or maybe RSS protocol. If you’re an Emacs user, it’s hard not to snicker. We’ve been enjoying the excellent Elfeed for years, which is, as Usher demands, open source, flexible, and extensible. Non Emacs users have Feedly, which is also an excellent RSS reader. There are plenty more, including the reincarnation of Reeder.
The problem isn’t a lack of good RSS readers, nor do we need a new protocol. What we need is for more people to realize what serious people have always known: if you have something consequential to say, you probably can’t say it in 140 (or even 280) characters and you need to either start a blog or use something like Substack.
One of Usher’s points is that sites like Substack operate by distributing their content by email and that’s not sustainable but it’s not clear her claim of unsustainability is true. Email users, like RSS users, can scan the subject lines and either read the article, delete it, or stow it for later, just like with RSS.
Even though their business model is based on subscriptions, there’s no obvious reason it couldn’t be adapted to work with RSS and I’d love to see that. But whether they do or not, RSS is here to stay. My daily feed averages about 90 articles, which I regard as suggestions. I don’t read them all but I get lots of interesting content and it all comes directly to my Emacs instance.