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
Sinclair Target / Motherboard : Tweets: @wingedpig , @davewiner , @drandrewthaler , @derektmead , and @dangillmor Tweets: 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/ ... Scripting Com / @davewiner : RSS did a lot of good. Created a level playing field betw bloggers and professional news orgs. Podcasting. The ideas in RSS are in Twitter today. And most pubs and blogs are still accessible through RSS, so basing a story on its supposed failure is pretty bogus imho. 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/... @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/ ... 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 retrospective lands mid-arc in a debate that has since intensified. Sinclair Target's history argues RSS lost to corporate-controlled silos despite being open; Dave Winer pushes back in the tweets bundled with the piece that RSS built a level playing field between bloggers and professional newsrooms, enabled podcasting, and survives inside Twitter's design — while Bloglines-era veteran Mark Fletcher concedes the format was simply too geeky to explain. The follow-on coverage shows why the argument aged well: Google Reader's shutdown became the cautionary tale, and Winer himself revisited it years later in an interview touching Mastodon's support for RSS feeds.
The piece matters now because the silos it describes are visibly restricting their own pipes — the related coverage tracks Twitter imposing limits and deprioritizing external links, Reddit alienating users, and decentralized networks like Mastodon and nostr gaining ground on Twitter's apparent decline. A 2019 history of an open format losing to walled gardens reads differently once the walls start inconveniencing the platforms' own users.
First-order effects
- Winer's core claim gives publishers and readers an immediately actionable fact: most publications and blogs remain accessible through RSS today, so the exit path from algorithmic feeds already exists without new infrastructure.
- The retrospective hands the decentralized-web camp its founding precedent — an open format that lost once to corporate silos — which Winer and others now cite when arguing for feed-based alternatives.
Second-order effects
- As platforms like X/Twitter punish external links and cap reach, publishers face pressure to route distribution through channels they control, reviving demand for the syndication layer RSS pioneered and that Mastodon now supports.
- Google Reader's fate becomes the standard argument in vendor and product decisions about building on any single company's aggregator or API — the Reader team's own retrospective supplies the post-mortem competitors cite.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, web distribution structurally oscillates between open syndication formats and corporate silos, with each silo's tightening (limits, link penalties, bans) feeding the next wave of protocol-based networks like ActivityPub and nostr.
- The counterweight the related coverage flags is real: decentralized, silo-free spaces have coincided with more conspiratorial thinking and app fatigue, so the open-web revival competes not just with corporations but with usability and trust costs.
The trend: The web is cycling back toward open, user-controlled syndication as centralized platforms restrict reach, making RSS's original defeat the template for both the revival and its risks.