RSS is alive and well. It’s rare that I find an interesting website where RSS makes sense and it doesn’t exist. Even if they don’t advertise it, popping the website’s address into a feed reader tends to be enough to find it. Even Mastodon and Bluesky profiles have RSS feeds.

Mozilla decided to remove its fantastic live bookmarks feature that seamlessly integrated RSS within bookmarks in 2018 with Firefox 64. Someone then made an extension which was ported to Chromium, and then back again to Firefox because original one was abandoned.

A dedicated extension is needed to have that feature back. Chrome needs one as well, so does Edge; only Vivaldi and Opera come with build-in feed readers. There are of course standalone applications but that seems to be a niche nowadays.

I've found an old rssowl opml file from 2014 last week and I decided to see what's still up. I've found some RSS readers in flathub but sadly, majority of what I was visiting back then died.

Ofc I did not mean they literally killed it. But Google improved and pushed Reader to the point where it was the ubiquitous client, then terminated it leaving everyone at the mercy of poor clones or paid options. This was at the precise time social media platforms gained traction, and while some kept up rss, the majority of personal publishing moved to facebook and later other closed platforms.

I still use rss daily for keeping up with we bsites, but now it is for 99% of internet users something tech embedded in an application, or just not heard of.

So in that sense, the poster child of "Web 2.0" was taken out back and kneecapped.