An interview with Dave Winer, who was instrumental in the creation and evolution of RSS, on Google Reader's demise, support for RSS feeds on Mastodon, and more
Thomas Claburn / The Register : Tweets: @rustybrick Tweets: Barry Schwartz / @rustybrick : Oh how I miss Google Reader and love RSS https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Dave Winer's conversation with The Register lands at a moment when RSS is having an unexpected afterlife. The format's decline has been well documented — why RSS lost out to centralized silos despite being an open standard — and Google Reader remains its most-cited casualty, with the app's own builders reflecting ten years later on what was lost when it shut down.
What changed since those retrospectives is the ground beneath the silos: [[a:841739|Twitter limits, Reddit backlash, and TikTok's regulatory jeopardy have destabilized the platforms]] that absorbed RSS's audience. Against that backdrop, Mastodon supporting RSS feeds gives Winer a concrete example of the open web regaining territory, making this interview less nostalgia than a status report.
First-order effects
- Mastodon's native RSS support hands Winer and other open-format advocates a live counterexample to the silo thesis, and The Register interview amplifies it to exactly the developer audience that builds readers and feed generators.
- For sites still publishing feeds, the interview is free validation: their distribution channel works without a platform intermediary's permission, unlike accounts subject to Twitter's rate limits or Reddit's API pricing.
Second-order effects
- Platform vendors face renewed pressure to meet users where they already are — Google had already tested a Follow button in Chrome for RSS-supporting sites, and Mastodon's move raises the cost of ignoring feeds for any social product courting refugees from closed networks.
- Reader and feed-tool makers get a second demand curve from users who never used Google Reader but are discovering feeds through Mastodon, echoing how Digg Reader's shutdown left the market thin enough that each new entrant matters.
Third-order effects
- If the exodus from centralized feeds persists, RSS shifts from legacy format to interop layer between decentralized social web instances and traditional publishing, with standards figures like Winer regaining agenda-setting influence they lost in 2013.
- The deeper pattern — corporate platforms absorbing open protocols, then users returning when platform incentives turn hostile — suggests regulation and federation pressure will keep pushing the industry back toward formats no single company can kill.
The trend: The open web is staging a comeback via decentralized social platforms, with RSS repositioning itself from a defeated format to the connective tissue of a post-Twitter ecosystem.