It has been 12 years since Google shut down Google Reader, its popular RSS news reader. The rise of social media newsfeeds had rendered RSS useless for many people, and declining usage led Google to sunset it.

But RSS feeds never went away. Many websites still make them available; they’re baked into most blogging utilities; and podcasting relies heavily on RSS feeds for distribution of audio and video files.

As algorithms determine what you see in social networks, and newsletter subscriptions require visits to your inbox, where your newsletters are mixed in with all your other emails, RSS news readers are making a comeback. New news readers are emerging, and older ones are making improvements with a range of features, including the incorporation of AI to assist with sorting and other tasks.

In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel explore the benefits of RSS, examine some of the features of the latest crop of readers, and discuss how an RSS resurgence can benefit communicators.

Links from this episode:

• Curate your own newspaper with RSS


• Reddit RSS discussion


• Why RSS Feeds Are Still Relevant in 2025

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, August 25.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz (00:01 )

Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 475 of Four Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

@nevillehobson (00:09 )

and I’m Neville Hobson. At the dawn of blogging 25 years ago, RSS was a quiet revolution. It let anyone subscribe to a blog or a podcast and receive updates instantly. No gatekeepers, no ads, no algorithms deciding what you should see. Just a simple feed, delivering content directly to your reader of choice. Fast forward to today and the digital landscape could hardly be more different. Our online experiences are now shaped by social media algorithms.

filtered through engagement metrics and interrupted by endless distractions. Many people have never even heard of RSS and those who do often assume it’s long gone. But here’s the twist, it never went away. And according to writer and technologist Molly White, best known for her clear-eyed critiques of Web3 and crypto hype, RSS may be due for a comeback. We’ll take a look at this right after this message.

In a recent long form post titled Curate Your Own Newspaper with RSS, Molly makes the case for reclaiming this overlooked piece of internet plumbing. It’s part how-to guide, part manifesto. She walks through setting up a modern feed reader, finding hidden RSS feeds, and building a curated stream of blogs, news and newsletters that reflect your actual interests, not what some platform thinks will keep you scrolling. She even shares how she structures her own reading habits.

offering a kind of digital self-care routine for anyone feeling overwhelmed by the flood of content today. Reading it, I was struck by how radical RSS now feels, not because it’s new, but because it puts the user back in charge. It reminded me of the early blogosphere when independent voices flourished and content was shared freely through syndication. That original spirit of openness and autonomy is still there, waiting to be rediscovered. People are talking about an RSS comeback.

driven by digital fatigue and a yearning for direct ad-free content. The Reddit RSS subreddit remains active, with users debating RSS’s survival and sharing workarounds where publishers drop support. Worries persist, though, especially about publishers de-prioritizing RSS or hiding feeds. And tech ecosystems like podcasting and the Fediverse continue to depend on feed standards.

In a world increasingly centralized, RSS is decentralized. In a world designed to grab attention, it respects your time. And in the world of world gardens, keeps the door open. And here’s a great comment on Hacker News. We’ve been fed algorithmic garbage for so long, people are rediscovering how good a hand-picked feed of trusted sources can feel. So here’s a question for us to explore. What role could RSS play in communication today?

Could it help rebuild trust in a media environment dominated by algorithms? Could communicators use it to deliver information more transparently or to reconnect with audiences looking for more intentional, less manipulative content? And for internal communication, other ways to syndicate updates, insights, or thought leadership that sidestep the noisy channels employees often tune out. That’s one for you, Cheryl.

Shel Holtz (03:26 )

I would love to see a resurgence of RSS. I was listening to a podcast interview over the weekend. It was all about the shift of journalism to Substack in particular, but they were also talking about, think it’s ⁓ Beekeeper is another one that, Beehive, right? And what they were talking about was the ability to get right into the user’s inbox without

@nevillehobson (03:44 )

Beehives, beehives. Yeah.

Shel Holtz (03:55 )

the intermediary of the algorithm getting in the way. And RSS does largely the same thing. And I think a lot of these people who are looking at subscription through newsletters might also consider ⁓ RSS feeds. There have been ongoing developments in RSS. One of the more exciting is how it’s being paired with artificial intelligence to make your feeds even smarter and more useful.

know, RSS typically just shows you the newest articles from your favorite sources and the order they were published. But now researchers and developers are combining RSS and large language models to help you discover the most relevant content in your feed without losing that control and privacy that makes RSS appealing in the first place. So instead of having to scroll endlessly through everything, your reader might highlight just a few items most relevant to your interests.

even if you’re new and haven’t given it much to go on. Another interesting development is what’s called content enrichment. Some of the new RSS readers are going beyond the bare minimum that RSS feeds typically deliver, which is a headline, link, and maybe a short blurb. Now, AI can step in and fill in the gaps. It can pull in the complete article text. It can pull in images. It can categorize topics. It can even write summaries for you.

So your RSS reader can give you something that looks and feels a lot more like a personalized news briefing. So these advances, I think, are really turning it into a more modern, intelligent way to stay informed on your terms without the algorithms. So if people can discover these new RSS news readers that really go…

beyond what we were accustomed to with the readers. mean, even thinking of ⁓ the Google News reader, the late lamented ⁓ Google News reader, which a lot of people said was going to kill RSS. Of course, that’s silly. RSS drives podcasting. So it’s not going anywhere. It really is plumbing. And I also found one site called RSS.app. Have you seen this? Yeah, I think it’s great. There are people who are worried

that the feeds are going away, that sites that offer them are going to stop offering them for one reason or another. But RSS app lets you create a feed for any site that’s publicly available. So if you want to add it to your news reader and it doesn’t have a news feed, RSS.app will fix that for you and give you an RSS feed from that site. So Edge and Chrome let you follow.

RSS feeds, ⁓ readers are evolving. I’m hopeful that this can just come back from the dead in a new, more modern iteration that solves a lot of problems for people.

@nevillehobson (06:58 )

Yeah, I the RSS.app site, I tried it out about a year or so back and it was okay but I didn’t like the fact that to do anything meaningful you had to take the paid option and I didn’t feel I wanted to do that at all. So it’s not really didn’t ring any bells for me at all. But you know the interesting thing, Shell, think, listening to what you’re saying, going back, you know, back in the day, 25 years ago,

we were all talking about RSS. it was kind of like ⁓ it’s a jargony word. It’s very tech oriented and trying to explain to people. I remember conversations a lot ⁓ to look at the, you know, there’s no single definition of what the letters stand for. Really simple syndication was the one that stuck out. I would suggest if anyone listening doesn’t know what it go