About this site
A site about RSS, the readers and podcasts that still run on it, and the fight over who may crawl the open web.
RSS Feeds Submission covers the syndication layer of the open web: the specifications that carry it, the applications that still read it, the newsletter platforms that grew up beside it, and the argument now running over which machines may fetch a page at all.
What is here
Thirty pieces across six sections. The plumbing section treats RSS 2.0, Atom (RFC 4287), JSON Feed, OPML, WebSub and the enclosure tag as documents with authors and histories. The readers section covers Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire, NewsBlur, Miniflux and FreshRSS. The newsletter section covers Substack, Ghost, beehiiv, Buttondown and Kit, and what Apple's Mail Privacy Protection did to the open rate in 2021.
The Blocking Fight — robots.txt, GPTBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, the Data Provenance Initiative's audit, Cloudflare's 2025 default and the proposed RSL licence — is reported as policy and measurement. Leaving the Platform covers ActivityPub, the AT Protocol, POSSE, IndieWeb and webmentions. How It Got Here goes back to Netscape's RDF Site Summary in 1999 and the governance fight that produced Atom.
How it is written
Every specification, figure and date is attributed in the sentence that carries it — to an RFC, to a company's own announcement, or to the published paper that measured it. Where a number will go stale, the sentence says when it was taken.