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Comment by austinjp | Hacker News Reader

> RSS or Atom, both of which also died.

Really? I didn't see a funeral?

You're nitpicking. Rss may still be a "thing" but its popularity is nothing like what it was a decade ago and doesn't seem to be heading in a positive direction

[Except maybe the podcast usecase]

I started using RSS this year and everything I wanted to follow turned out to have RSS feed, although sometimes an inoffical one (https://hnrss.github.io/ for HN, Nitter for Twitter, ...).

You can still use them if you want, but browsers, etc. stopped supporting them a while ago. They're just kinda irrelevant except for a tiny niche now.

Browser support for RSS was never serious anyway. RSS is definitely not irrelevant, for one it's how almost all podcasts are distributed.

I dunno, I used a lot of RSS feeds and feed readers back in the day. It was a good digest mechanism before Google News and social news. Now it just seems a historical oddity.

Sure, maybe podcasts use it as an underlying protocol, but users' experiences depend more on the front-end client (some app) than the playlist protocol. It's not really a discovery protocol either; turns out having a central index like Spotify or the podcast apps do works better anyway.

I think it's irrelevant in the sense that it could be trivially replaced by app-specific implementations, and few people would even notice anymore.

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