Who Still Reads It · the piece to read first
Reader was infrastructure pretending to be a product — the sync layer under half the feed clients on the internet. When Google switched it off, the format was untouched and the onramp was gone.
Read the piece →Every podcast anyone has ever heard arrived down a feed. So did most newsletters, before the email. The format did not go anywhere — it went under everything.
The Blocking Fight
It was proposed in 1994, standardised as syntax only in 2022, and has never had legal force anywhere. Since August 2023 it has carried the whole argument between publishers and the companies training models.
The Format and Its Plumbing
Dave Winer added one optional element to RSS 0.92 in 2001 so an item could point at a file instead of a page. Apple Podcasts and Spotify are both still reading it.
The Newsletter Pipe
Mail Privacy Protection shipped with iOS 15 in September 2021 and pre-loaded remote images. The open rate stopped measuring anything the same week.
1 JULY
2025
New domains began blocking AI crawlers unless the owner allowed them, with a pay-per-crawl beta alongside. For thirty years an unfamiliar crawler met silence, and silence meant yes. One infrastructure company changed what silence means for the domains it fronts.
The Blocking Fight →Three more rooms in this building
Substack, Ghost, beehiiv, Buttondown, Kit, deliverability, DMARC, and what Apple Mail Privacy Protection did to open rates in 2021.
ActivityPub, Mastodon, Bluesky and AT Protocol, POSSE, IndieWeb, webmentions, static site generators, and the blogroll's return.
Netscape's RDF Site Summary (1999), Dave Winer, the Atom split, Bloglines, Technorati, the blogosphere's peak, and the 2013 pivot.