Ask HN: Is RSS Still Alive?

RSS isn't just alive; it's the only remaining protocol for deterministic content delivery. There is a fundamental philosophical divide between RSS and the current AI-driven wave that people often miss: RSS is a Push system: If I subscribe to a source, I get 100% of the signal. The 'algorithm' is my own intent. AI is a Filtering system: AI is probabilistic. Its entire job is to guess what I want, which by definition means it creates a 'lossy' stream. People claim AI can 'replace' RSS by summarizing my interests, but AI will never be able to provide the certainty of a feed. I don't want an AI to 'guess' which security advisory or niche technical blog post I should read today; I want the raw signal that I explicitly requested. As long as there are professionals who value information completeness over algorithmic convenience, RSS (or its successor) will be a hard requirement. You can't replace a pipe with a concierge.

It's very much alive. It's the primary way I keep up with sites on the web. One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of websites have RSS feeds but don't advertise them or offer an obvious link, but are discoverable by looking at the site's page source.

> Now, with the advent of Agentic AI they seem to be an old fashioned way that is needed anymore.

One of the main reasons I use RSS is to assemble a news feed that I read. It's hard to see how Agentic AI can improve on that.

> Now, with the advent of Agentic AI

Why having an easy way to organise a data feed that will work even on cheapest clients and servers, when you can simply boil a tank of water to get a half-assed hallucination loosely based on the source, right?

I have seen people trying to bury RSS for the past 15 years — didn’t happen yet. It is still widely used by blog enthusiasts — that’s basically how I get information about new posts from my favourite old-tech authors.

> So, I looked for them as well but few websites have them.

Many sites have rss, it‘s just not advertised as much as it was some years ago. I built a feed finder tool that goes far beyond rss autodiscover, it might be useful: https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder

And an article how it works: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds

> So, I looked for them as well but few websites have them.

This is a bit surprising for me. I've just randomly checked news: BBC, Guardian, Norwegian NRK - all had RSS. But I'm not checking news that much so not sure about others. Mastodon and BlueSky are also providing RSS. I guess walled garden ones like Instagram/Twitter don't?

My RSS reader is subscribed to:

- one Youtube channel

- several blogs (most blogs do have RSS, for example Wordpress provide it by default)

- Hacker News (few keyword-based feeds)

- Gitlab and Codeberg projects (Github provides RSS, but I'm not currently subscribed to any, because I need to be logged there anyway)

- podcasts (podcasts are basically just RSS)

- few Mobilizon sites for events

- OpenStreetMap QA tool that checks my edits

- two subreddits

Maybe in general, you are right. I know just my bubble and even there are few sites without RSS (like Bandcamp).

I saw your Ask HN via RSS

I use SimpleRSS Push on iPhone which have push notifications. It's old but works for me.

Humans in general are overrated and not needed anymore.