RSS Is Not Dead

RSS was declared dead several times in the decade following Google Reader's shutdown in 2013. The declaration was premature. The protocol never disappeared. It retreated from mainstream consumer use and consolidated among readers who valued chronological, unmediated access to content from sources they had chosen.

That consolidation turns out to be a durable audience. Feed readers have proliferated rather than declined. Feedbin, Reeder, NetNewsWire, Inoreader — the ecosystem is healthy. Podcast infrastructure is built entirely on RSS. Newsletter platforms export RSS feeds. The protocol outlasted the platforms that were supposed to replace it.

For a publisher, RSS is the cleanest distribution channel available. A subscriber who follows a feed receives every post in the order it was published, without algorithmic filtering, without engagement optimisation, without the platform deciding which posts deserve distribution based on signals the publisher does not control. The relationship between publisher and reader is direct.

This makes RSS strategically valuable independent of its audience size. Feed subscribers are high-intent readers. They installed a feed reader, found the feed URL, and subscribed deliberately. The friction of that process selects for exactly the audience most likely to read carefully and return consistently.

Flatpack generates a valid RSS 2.0 feed at /rss.xml on every build. The feed includes every published post up to the configured limit, with title, link, publication date, and GUID. The autodiscovery link in the HTML head allows feed readers to find the feed automatically from any page on the site.

The implementation is a template literal and a loop. The value is a direct channel to the readers who want one.