Who Still Uses RSS in 2025?

You'd be surprised. Despite declarations of RSS being "dead" since around 2013, feed readers have quietly experienced a renaissance. Feedbin reports millions of subscribers. Substack newsletters are just RSS with a username check. The indieweb community never stopped caring. And yet, most modern platforms treat RSS like a legacy feature—something to hide behind a settings menu or abandon entirely.

This used to frustrate me. Until I started building Jottings.

The Great Platform Divergence

Most platforms have made a calculated choice: push their users toward proprietary apps and algorithm-driven timelines. It's understandable from a business perspective. More engagement, more control, more data. But it comes at a cost.

Twitter/X: Feed access is locked behind their API paywall. Good luck getting your timeline into a reader.

Bluesky: Open protocol, but feed architecture is still optimized for their app first.

Medium: RSS exists, but it's buried and feels like an afterthought.

Threads: No public feed export at all. Your timeline stays in their app.

Substack: RSS works, but only for newsletters they host directly.

The pattern is clear: feeds are seen as friction, not as a feature. Feeds mean users can leave. Feeds mean they don't need your app. Feeds mean less dependency on your platform's decisions about what to show them.

Why That Bothers Me

I've been using RSS readers since 2010. I've watched the landscape shift. I remember when Google Reader shut down and people legitimately mourned. That taught me something important: the power to read on your own terms matters.

When you own a feed, you own the data. You control the client. You choose how to organize, consume, and archive your information. No algorithm decides what you see. No platform changes the UI and breaks your muscle memory. You're not the product—you're the user.

That's not quaint. That's increasingly radical in a platform-first world.

What Jottings Does Differently

When I designed Jottings, I made RSS a first-class citizen. Not buried. Not optional. Fundamental.

Every Jottings site ships with:

RSS 2.0 - The classic. Maximal compatibility across readers and tools. Your jots published in a format that's been stable for two decades.

Atom - The modern alternative. Better-structured, with superior handling of timestamps and content types.

JSON Feed - For the future. A feed format designed for native APIs and AI tools. Perfect if you're integrating Jottings content into your workflow or letting AI agents crawl your thoughts.

But here's what makes it really different: per-tag feeds. Want to subscribe only to posts about JavaScript? /tag/javascript/feed.xml. Only following tech thoughts from a friend? Subscribe to their tech-tagged feed. Feeds become granular.

We also have a feeds page on every site. Not hidden. Visible. It says: "These are your feeds. Use them wherever you want."

The Practical Reality

Let me be honest about who this serves:

Feed reader enthusiasts - People using Feedly, NetNewsWire, or Miniflux. You get what you expect: clean, standard feeds that work everywhere.

Developers and tinkerers - JSON Feed format means you can build on top of Jottings content. Parse feeds programmatically. Build aggregators, dashboards, or custom readers.

AI researchers and agents - JSON Feed format is inherently more parseable for LLMs and web crawlers. If you're experimenting with AI tools that consume content feeds, Jottings plays nicely.

Long-term archivists - RSS feeds are a form of time-travel. Your content becomes decoupled from any single platform's longevity. Even if Jottings disappeared, your feeds are portable to any other platform that respects RSS.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Full disclosure: RSS support probably won't move the needle for most users. The median user won't notice or care. Jottings' target audience skews toward people who already care about portability, open standards, and owning their data. That's a smaller audience than building toward algorithmic engagement would capture.

But that's the point. Jottings isn't trying to be everything to everyone. We're building for people who believe the web works better when you can own your audience, control your data, and read on your terms.

Why This Matters Now

2025 feels like an inflection point. People are exhausted by algorithmic feeds. Twitter's unpredictability made people nervous about platform dependency. AI training on public content raised new questions about who owns what you publish.

In this environment, platforms that embrace open standards and feed formats aren't being quaint—they're being realistic. They're saying: "Your content is yours. Take it anywhere."

That's become genuinely valuable.

What's Next

We're not stopping at basic feed support. The roadmap includes:

• Feed discovery - Ways to surface interesting feeds across the Jottings ecosystem
• Feed analytics - See who's reading your feeds and from where
• Smart feeds - Generated feeds based on multiple tags or authors

All while keeping feeds standard, open, and portable.

The Bottom Line

Do you need RSS? Probably not if you're happily in one app's ecosystem. But maybe you want the option. Maybe you like the feeling of control. Maybe you run an RSS reader and it's become part of your information diet.

If any of that resonates, Jottings gets it. We built feeds first because we think your content deserves to be readable anywhere, by anyone, in any tool.

That's not just a feature. That's a philosophy.

The feeds are here. Use them.