RSS in 2026

Current-state coverage of RSS: who still uses the format, what changed after consumer feed readers declined, and which industries depend on it today. Written for readers deciding whether RSS is still worth building on. Includes comparisons with platform APIs and newsletters, and practical notes on feed discovery and reliability. The short answer is that the format did not shrink, it moved into the plumbing: podcasts, aggregators, monitoring and automation all still run on it. What declined is the number of people reading feeds by hand. Publishing one today is mostly about being machine-readable.