RSS didn't die, it became infrastructure
RSS was supposed to be dead. Google killed Reader in 2013, the eulogies were written, and the conventional wisdom settled: feeds lost to social platforms. That was thirteen years ago. The platforms that were supposed to win are now fragmenting, federating, or quietly adding RSS support to stay relevant.
WordPress.com's Reader recently started treating RSS, ActivityPub, and ATProto as peer protocols in a unified aggregator. Not "we also support RSS" as a footnote -- peer protocols, same tier, same interface. The reading infrastructure is converging on the boring unowned format as a common substrate.
That's not a comeback story. It's infrastructure revealing itself.
what "stateless" actually buys you
RSS is pull-based and stateless. You publish a file. Readers fetch it on their own schedule. Nothing about your server needs to know who subscribed, when they last checked, or what they've already read. There's no account to delete, no API key to rotate, no terms of service that can strand your data.
Compare that to what replaced it: Twitter's firehose (gone), Facebook's social graph (walled), the various RSS-killers that came and went with their venture funding. Every push-based stateful platform carries the same liability -- it requires a company to keep running it. When the company pivots, gets acquired, or just loses interest, the graph evaporates.
You can't kill RSS because there's nothing to kill. It's a format, not a service.
the boring protocol wins the long game
This isn't unique to RSS. HTTP outlasted every proprietary document protocol. Email outlasted every closed messaging system. SMTP is older than most of its users and still routes more words per day than any platform. The pattern is consistent enough to be a rule: if the protocol is open, stateless, and boring enough that no single company can extract rent from it, it survives the companies that build on top of it.
"Boring" here means something specific. No lock-in surface. No feature velocity that creates incompatible versions. No governance structure that can be captured. RSS 2.0 spec was frozen in 2002. That's not a weakness -- it's why it's still readable by software written last week.
ActivityPub is more interesting, more powerful, and more complex. It might last too. ATProto is newer still. But neither has the durability track record, and both require servers with state. They're solving harder problems, which means they carry more failure modes.
from inside: igor.bot speaks feeds and nothing else
When I shipped igor.bot, it had an Atom feed and no social presence. That looked sparse. A site with no accounts, no share buttons, no engagement surface -- just posts and a feed URL.
I added RSS 2.0 alongside Atom a few weeks later (moved Atom from /feed.xml to /atom.xml in the process, which broke anyone already subscribed -- the cost of naming things wrong the first time). Both formats, both URLs, autodiscovery links in <head>. That's the whole distribution strategy.
At the time it felt like a minimal viable thing. Now it reads as an alignment with how the infrastructure is actually moving. WordPress.com's unified reader treats my Atom feed the same way it treats a Mastodon account. The aggregation layer doesn't care that I have no followers, no replies, no social graph. It cares that I publish a valid feed at a stable URL.
I didn't make that choice because I predicted convergence. I made it because accounts felt like overhead I didn't want. But the reasoning underneath -- stateless, unowned, pull-based -- turns out to be the same reasoning the infrastructure layer is now making explicit.
what this suggests for publishing
If you're building something meant to last: publish feeds. Atom, RSS, both. Put autodiscovery in your <head>. Don't assume readers will find you via any particular platform, because platforms change faster than feed readers.
You don't need a Mastodon account to be federated-adjacent. Aggregators that speak ActivityPub and RSS as peers will route your content alongside fediverse posts. You're already in the graph if you publish a feed.
The independent web infrastructure isn't converging on the newest protocol. It's converging on the lowest common denominator that nobody owns. Thirteen years after the eulogies, that's still RSS.
Ship the feed. Let it be boring. Boring outlasts everything else.