You can absolutely have an RSS dependent website in 2026
60 points by Jackevansevo
60 points by Jackevansevo
I was RSS/Atom only for the first ~20 years of my blog, and then a few years ago I started abusing Substack as a free newsletter provider (because I didn't want to either pay for sending email or store those addresses myself) - and honestly I regret not having done that sooner, my email subscribers now 5x my feed subscribers as far as I can tell, and I frequently have people at conferences saying "oh, I love your newsletter" - which is always a surprise because it really is just a week's worth of content copied from my blog.
The downside of using Substack for this is that I occasionally get accused of being a fascist sympathizer. They're not making any money off me directly, though I guess my presence there may be helping them sign up people who later subscribe to a paid newsletter.
People are following trends like lemmings. So if trend is newsletter, they switch from newsletter.
But don’t underestimate the "naming" aspect. At book-signing fairs, I’ve met people that told me they were reading my "newsletter" while meaning my "blog" because they were reading it directly from the website. Lot of people are confusing all those terms.
The "trend" of newsletters is that they are much easier and effective to monetize.
An email address can be sold, or correlated to other newsletters the platform is pushing. Customized links in the email itself can be used to track "engagement".
RSS lacks a lot of the monetization "hooks" used in the wider web, which is a big reason it's not as popular anymore.
(As an aside, the "golden age of blogging" occurred because it was an effective way of selling ads, and thus getting money. As money flowed to services like YouTube and podcasts and... newsletters, bloggers followed.)
That, and normal people have an email address and understand email - it's an open standard that people actually use.
That's a very good point. I remember during the heyday of blogging when there were RSS buttons everywhere but it never really took off. I also believe Google killed Reader because it simply wasn't used as much as they had hoped (or rather, wasn't growing at the pace they expected).
Meanwhile Substack is a bona fide unicorn.
I've been on a spree of adding feeds to my Miniflux node (and I just added yours!)
I'm 100% finding there is a pretty well thriving web out there that hasn't been enshittified.
I have also had a really positive experience with this. I started my software blog at the end of 2023—it had no distribution mechanism other than RSS and some friends willing to share the links. It still doesn't. Not all of my posts are hits, but most of the things I write get shared around and I get decent feedback on the aggregators and in my email inbox. Sometimes I check sites like this one and see that someone else has written something based on my work. It won't always, but the "if you build it they will come" strategy really can pan out, provided you build something that a few people think is worth coming to.
A friend of mine often reminds me that software is a unique field in that it still values both writing and websites (at least parts of it do), which make an RSS-based audience possible. This is unquestionably true today, but I also think it is a problem which can be solved (and I am interested in solving it).
I don't have anything against email newsletters—infinitely better as a distribution mechanism than platform social media—but there are benefits to not having one. Eschewing analytics, instant feedback, and audience data keeps you from chasing them. A couple months ago I wrote a blog post about Prolog that no one bothered to share to any of the aggregators, but the guy who made the Prolog system I used in the post somehow found it, emailed me, and shared it with his Prolog community. I'm sure it was my worst-performing post in years but that one email made the month-long project worth it. Different incentives produce different results.
I wonder how far you could get by pointing people that don't have an feed reader to an feed2mail service like blogtrottr, feedrabbit, follow.it
The problem is that I’m reluctant to ask people to give their mail address to a service I don’t control.
Else, what would be nice is to have an url such as : www.feed2email.com/ploum.net/atom.xml so people don’t even need to be aware that it is an external service.
Most of those RSS hits are just readers that ignore TTLs and HTTP cache headers. When I turn off my CDN I see jillions of hits from NetNewsWire as well
Same thing on my site: a lot of people use the RSS feed. I accidentally broke it last year, and immediately got lots of complaints, so the traffic is real people and not bots. (Well, feed readers are bots, but not that kind of bot)
It's popular enough that I haven't bothered implementing a newsletter: That would require an endless struggle to get big tech to accept my emails... or paying someone else to do that for me.
Although I mostly write about computing and (computing adjacent) electronics. I'd be very interested to see what the numbers look like for, say, a cooking website.
Amen. I only added a mailing-list to my website because a lot of people asked for it. But I would happily get rid of it if not for those people.
Prompted by this article, I had a look at my own logs, and have seen similar results:
For my old blog (active between 2010 and 2023), I had 1319 RSS feed hits, 507 other hits, and 10 hits on the root URL on the 8th. On my new blog (2023+), it's 3783 RSS feed hits, 1574 root URL hits, and 1011 others. So it looks like the older the site is, the more it shifts towards RSS.
I'm liking that trend.
It's worth looking at the user agents for those - some of the larger aggregator sites expose information like:
Feedly/1.0 (+https://feedly.com/poller.html; 3982 subscribers; )