A look back at the evolution of RSS and why it lost out to centralized information silos on the web controlled by corporations, despite being an open format
Before the internet was consolidated into centralized information silos, RSS imagined a better way to let users control their online personas. Tweets: @derektmead , @wingedpig , @drandrewthaler , and @dangillmor Tweets: @derektmead : this is a wonderful deep dive into RSS, a beautifully simple technology that could assuage a lot of the ills readers feel towards the current information delivery paradigm http://motherboard.vice.com/ ... Mark Fletcher / @wingedpig : I think this is a good overview of the history of RSS. I agree with the theory that it didn't catch on because RSS was too geeky and we were never able to explain it well. http://motherboard.vice.com/ ... Andrew Thaler / @drandrewthaler : “demise” is a weird way to frame the future of RSS. Your podcast app is an RSS reader. More people are using RSS now than ever before, it's just so baked into our apps we don't even think about it. http://twitter.com/... Dan Gillmor / @dangillmor : The sad “rise and demise” of RSS. http://motherboard.vice.com/ ... Sad because of what it could/should have been: an antidote to centralized corporate control of the Internet.
Context & Ripple Effects
Motherboard's deep dive into RSS history argues the open format lost not on merit but because corporate-run information silos won the distribution war — a diagnosis commentators like Mark Fletcher and Dan Gillmor publicly endorsed at the time. The piece matters because it names the fork in the road the web took: user-controlled feeds versus platform-controlled timelines.
The years since have kept the question alive. Dave Winer, instrumental in RSS's creation, has since discussed Google Reader's demise and RSS support on Mastodon, while the Reader team itself reflected on what went wrong ten years after Google killed the app — both revisiting the same failure this article describes.
First-order effects
- Readers dissatisfied with algorithmic feeds get a concrete historical counter-model: RSS let users control their own personas and subscriptions, which is exactly the control the silo era removed.
Second-order effects
- As platform turmoil mounts — Twitter limits, Reddit alienating users, TikTok facing a possible ban — decentralized networks like Mastodon and nostr gain traction partly by re-adopting open feed formats, giving RSS's design a second audience.
Third-order effects
- If the decentralization wave holds, the industry faces the same trade-off RSS-era builders did: open protocols restore user control but, as Wired's reporting on the decentralized web shows, they also fragment audiences and raise app fatigue — meaning openness alone doesn't guarantee a healthier information ecosystem.
The trend: The web is cycling back toward open, user-controlled distribution protocols as trust in centralized platforms erodes, with RSS's history serving as the template for both the promise and the pitfalls.