What an RSS feed is for
On the least impressive technology I use daily, the two properties that make it structurally different from everything else, and the reason your podcasts have been running on it the whole time.
A colleague asked me what the orange icon in a site’s footer was for. They’ve been doing this for two years, they’re very good, and they had genuinely never encountered one.
I gave a bad answer. It was largely about Google Reader shutting down in 2013 and how things used to be, which is a thing older people do and which I would like to stop doing. They wanted to know what it was for, now, in the present tense, and I’d answered a question about the past.
So here’s the answer I should have given.
It’s a file
That’s most of it, and it’s the part that makes everything else make sense.
A feed is a file sitting at a URL, listing the most recent things a site published, each with a title, a date, a link and usually the whole text. When you subscribe, you are giving a piece of software the address of that file. Every so often it fetches it and looks for entries it hasn’t seen.
<entry>
<title>What an RSS feed is for</title>
<link href="https://example.com/writing/what-an-rss-feed-is-for/"/>
<updated>2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
<content type="html">...</content>
</entry>There’s no account. No company in the middle. Nobody is running a service that has to stay solvent for this to keep working, because the only two parties are a web server that was already serving the site and a program on your machine that can make an HTTP request.
Which is why it’s still here after 25 years, and why nothing has replaced it. There’s nothing to acquire and nothing to shut down.
Two properties, and they’re the whole point
It is chronological, complete, and it ends.
Everything from everyone you subscribed to, in the order it was published, and then a bottom of the list. Nothing is promoted, nothing is withheld, nothing is inserted, and if a writer you follow posts twice in a day you get both, and if they post nothing for eight months you get nothing and then you get the thing they posted in the ninth month.
I had forgotten this was unusual until I tried to describe it. Every other reading surface I use is infinite and sorted by something other than time, and the difference in how it feels to reach the end of a list is much larger than it sounds.
And the publisher doesn’t know you’re there.
There’s no follow, no account, no notification when you subscribe. I’ve been reading some of these people for eight years and none of them have any idea.
I should be honest that this cuts both ways and it’s a real reason platforms won. Writing into a feed is writing into silence. You get no follower count, no signal that anybody arrived, and if you want to know whether anyone read a thing, RSS will not tell you. Some people need that number and there is nothing wrong with them for needing it.
It didn’t die, it stopped being a product
The thing I should have led with, and the fact that usually lands.
Every podcast in the world is an RSS feed. That’s not a metaphor or a legacy detail, it’s the actual mechanism: a show publishes a feed, your app polls it, new episode appears. The most successful new media format of the last 15 years is built entirely on the technology everybody describes as dead.
What died in 2013 was one popular reader, and with it the idea that this would be a mainstream consumer thing with a logo. The plumbing never went anywhere. It’s just that most people now touch it through an app that never says the word.
Getting started, and the mistake everybody makes
Pick a reader. There are a dozen, several are free, and it matters far less than the tutorials suggest. I pay about $30 a year for one that syncs between my phone and my laptop and I could not tell you the last time I thought about it.
Then subscribe to fewer things than you want to.
This is the whole difficulty and the reason most people bounce off. The first week you add 40 feeds because adding them is fun, and by the second week there’s an unread count in the hundreds, and it now feels like an inbox, which is to say a pile of obligations you’re behind on. Then you stop opening it.
10 to 20 feeds is a reading habit. A hundred is a second job you have assigned to yourself for no money.
What it’s bad at
Discovery, entirely. A feed reader will never show you somebody you don’t already follow, which is the exact hole I was writing about last month with blogrolls. The two halves fit together: somebody has to point, and the feed is where the pointing lands.
Conversation, mostly. There are no comments and no replies in a reader, and the discussion around a post happens somewhere you aren’t. I’ve made my peace with that and I know people who can’t.
And it’s noticeably worse for anything of the moment. RSS is good at people who write occasionally and at length. If what you want is the news in the last 20 minutes, this is the wrong tool and I wouldn’t try to sell it to you.
Put a feed on it
If you write anything at all on your own site, please put a feed on it. On this one it’s a plugin and about four lines of configuration, and it’s very likely your static site generator does it already and you’ve never checked. Publish the full text rather than a truncated summary, if you can bear to. Making people click through to see the rest is a small tax on the person who liked you enough to subscribe.
And the icon in the footer, to answer the actual question: it means you can read this without the site knowing, without an account, without an algorithm deciding, and without anybody’s permission, including mine. Which is not a revolution. It’s just about the only place left where that’s true, and it costs a plugin.