RE: https://fediverse.zachleat.com/@zachleat/116845291090365543

Obviously everyone knows that Vic Gundotra killed Reader, but he didn't succeed immediately. He could destaff the project, but people could still spend 20% time maintaining it. It was inevitable that it would die, but what the final blow was a standard Google outcome - load bearing infrastructure was going to be turned off, and everyone had to port their project to the replacement that didn't really work yet. Reader just didn't have the resources, so died.

(An especially funny version of this is that Google Hangouts lasted a year longer than it should have done, because Google Cloud Print depended on Hangouts, so they threw resources at maintaining it so they could have an orderly deprecation)

Also just fuck that guy for being awful regardless of what he did to an extremely good product

@mjg59 Unpopular take: Google Reader was nothing special, but lots of people who should have known better decided that this re-centralized version of RSS was equivalent to RSS, and so when Google Reader died so did RSS. All the anger about Google killing RSS is wrong, they just killed one barely-above-mediocre app.

[ narrator ] RSS is exactly as alive as it ever was.

Google Reader's one innovation was "what if cache". It was the Clownflare of blog syndication.

@jwz Various sources stopped providing RSS feeds because they'd interpreted them as a way to feed into Google Reader, so there was ecosystem impact even outside popular awareness of availability - but you're right, at a technical level everyone could have just carried on doing this with independent clients

@mjg59
As just one data point: in 2013, when Google Reader was killed, there were 69M WordPress sites.

In 2026, there are 600M WordPress sites.

That means that in the years since Google "killed" RSS, there are *at the very least* 531 million additional RSS feeds.

@jwz @mjg59 how many readers to these have though?

I do agree that the sunset of GR didn't kill RSS, but it sent a clear signal that the Internet giant didn't like it. Arguably the final nail in the coffin for its adoption client-side was Mozilla removing in-browser support for the feeds, which is *so* thorough that the RSS and Atom feed mime types don't even fall back to the default XML view. But I'm ready to bet I know why Mozilla made this decision, and that's because of Google again.

@mjg59 [citation needed]. Show me any nontrivial site not owned by Zuckerberg or Musk that doesn't have RSS.

@jwz Fair, I think it's more that they stopped advertising rather than necessarily actually removed support - there's nothing obvious on the BBC to indicate it's a source, for instance.

@jwz@mastodon.social @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer The death of rss was cultural, tho. It disappeared from people's consciousness, even in the tech sector.
A couple years back, a friend working at a large multinational software company was talking with me about this cool project his backend colleagues were thinking about, that could revolutionize how content was distributed and updated in their infrastructure. He was really surprised when, unprompted, I revealed to him details of how it could and should work, and possible pitfalls they might encounter. They were trying to reinvent RSS because nobody in the company had even heard of it.

@bovaz ouch

@mjg59 How does cloud print end up depending on hangouts ?!?!??!

@mshdk @mjg59 cloud print is (was) XMPP in disguise.

You want to make printers print stuff from the cloud, right? So you need a way for the printer to be notified when there's a new print job. Do happen to have a protocol and infra lying around that does unicast notifications with the subscribers being millions of consumer devices? You do! It's your chat app. So don't build that again just put a chat client on the printer so you can message it when you want to print.

@mshdk @mjg59 just rotate your mind so that you stop thinking of XMPP as "chat" and think of it as a global scale notification system of which chat is just one application, and then stop thinking of it as "hangouts infra" and think of it as Google's XMPP infra of which hangouts is one user. Then it all makes sense.

And the X in XMPP is for "eXtensible" - it was always designed to be used for different things!

@jwz @mjg59

The problem with most RSS readers was that the read/unread state was tracked in the client. I used to read RSS feeds on my desktop and it was great because I could easily see new and unread things. A few years later, I wanted to read things on my laptop, phone, and tablet, and each one had its own RSS reader, so the state wasn't shared.

I didn't use Google Reader, but it would have solved the problem that I actually had. I used NextCloud News (OwnCloud News back then) for a bit, but there were also other problems with RSS (full article vs summary, people messing up stable identifiers, lack of windowing leading to huge fetches, and so on).

It's a real shame Atom over XMPP didn't catch on.

@mjg59 Google Cloud Print depending on Hangouts (!!?!) feels like it’s going to turn out to be due to an extreme version of Hyrum’s Law 🤔

https://www.hyrumslaw.com

@bovaz @mjg59 @jwz honestly RSS totally sucked as a user experience … and anyone who lacks the honesty to admit this is either lying to the world or lying to themselves. I don’t know which is worse. Not sure it matters.

@jwz @mjg59 we will always have HTML and CSS and I’d take that choice every day, any day, for the rest of my life

@codinghorror @bovaz @mjg59 @jwz Was it really RSS, or the applications built around it? IIRC Google Reader was pretty popular during it's time, until vendors started to push ppl away from syndication (incl. killing Reader) in general.

@buherator @jwz @bovaz @mjg59 as I said...: not sure it matters. But we can re-fight this war if everyone wants to lose again, I guess.

@codinghorror @buherator @jwz @bovaz @mjg59

the fight won't matter, as it has been fought too many times. Maybe I'm just an old relic still using RSS for my daily dose of news from way too many sites.

How do other people consume their news without RSS, if I may ask? I don't have the time to visit O(25) web sites and be assaulted by graphical overloads.

@realmurphy @buherator @jwz @bovaz @mjg59 that's the other thing. RSS is still there. But you know... war. War never changes, does it? https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror/116850034849821564

@codinghorror @bovaz @mjg59 @jwz it was great as a junior dev user experience. I didn’t know how to programme and API connection, but I could feed the RSS of multiple blogs into Reader, sort and categorise them and (unless this is a false memory) repost those categories as RSS feeds into a CMS on different pages (which desktop rss apps could do). My only technical skill was CSS, and RSS with Reader in the middle was like magic.

@nicol @bovaz @mjg59 @jwz it's still there, though. Nobody waved a magic wand and made RSS disappear from shared reality.. yet.

@codinghorror@infosec.exchange @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer @jwz@mastodon.social I think the dev experience was less than ideal, because of version incompatibilities.
The user experience is possibly mostly to blame on the client side of things. Even html/css/js sucks without a browser to parse it and render it.
For example, the fact that it's not push-based is a positive feature, to me, for what rss is meant to do. This is not to say "push" systems don't have their place.

@codinghorror@infosec.exchange @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer @jwz@mastodon.social On the other hand, most successful "feed-based" things I see online are push based, so clearly there's something there that works for most people and not much for me.

@bovaz @mjg59 @jwz yeah we like to call it "electronic mail"

@codinghorror @bovaz @mjg59 @jwz wait really? Maybe I’m weird I still use RSS to this day (via NetNewsWire) and enjoy it very much. Certainly more than most social media apps. The only annoyances are sites that don’t have full content feeds (only article summaries) or major sites that flood you with 100s of posts a day.

@codinghorror @bovaz @mjg59 @jwz

What @mzagaja said.

I moved all my feeds into Google Reader when it was already middle-aged: it was so convenient to have all my feeds set up and ready to go on any machine.

Then, when Google sent Reader to the Graveyard, I just went back to reading all the individual sites like a caveman.

This year, after reader prompting, I rediscovered it. I tried in Thunderbird but I find its reader a little clunky. So, like Matt, I am using NetNewsWire, and at risk of sounding like a burger advert, I'm loving it. Saves me a good hour every morning.

I tried to share the joy:

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/03/09/rss-dulls-the-pain-of-the-modern-web/5226760

@codinghorror @bovaz @mjg59 @jwz
Oh, you mean those occasional needles in a haystack of spam? Yeah, gimme RSS, any day, any time...

@codinghorror @nicol @bovaz @mjg59 @jwz
... apart from the sites that don't offer an RSS feed, and absolutely want you to subscribe to their email feed.

@realmurphy @codinghorror @jwz @bovaz @mjg59 The avg internet user relies on social media for news curation, with all the known consequences. I still hold that RSS is good enough, consumerism winning over DIY (let's call it that...) is rooted much deeper than a protocol spec.

@lproven @codinghorror @bovaz @mjg59 @jwz @mzagaja Does it though? I mean *waves at all of the empire of shit*

@realmurphy @codinghorror @buherator @jwz @bovaz @mjg59 O(25)? More like O(600).

It helps I wrote my own feed reader and have been maintaining it for almost a quarter century now, it's perfectly suited for my needs, foremost being filtering out stuff I am not just not interested in, whether the Kardashians or football, but feel attacked if I am even exposed to a mention of.

@codinghorror @bovaz @mjg59 @jwz my Firefox had an orange RSS-Symbol in the address bar. I clicked it. It would open my feed reader, asking me if I wanted to subscribe.

Sadly, it hasn't been this easy in 15 years. But it _was_ pretty good.