Where Did All the Feeds Go?

I've noticed a troubling trend lately. RSS feeds seem to be disappearing from a lot of business, news, and even personal websites, and the trend seems to be accelerating. Now Reddit is pulling its RSS feeds. This isn't a new trend. Twitter (now X, and I hate that name) discontinued its official RSS feeds back in 2013. Years later, services like Nitter and XCancel came along, offering alternative ways to follow Twitter/X content. These were great services, but they have since been discontinued following legal threats from Elon Musk's X.

Earlier in 2026 I was noticing RSS was making a comeback. I was reading about Dave Winer, one of the inventors of RSS, doing things with it (namely his rss.chat). I use RSS to read the sites I want to follow without having a lot of browser tabs. When I find a site that interests me, I subscribe so I have an easy way to follow all the sites I want in one place. I will visit sites again via the RSS feed if the full post is not there. RSS seemed to be enjoying a resurgence, only to suddenly appear to be going out of vogue again, especially business-related ones.

For some business examples, there is Samsung Community, where the RSS feeds I used to follow are no longer available after its recent platform upgrade. I used them to keep up with trends and other information that might affect my phones and laptops. Another one was Food.com. Its RSS feed stopped working in the same month, October 2026.

A few personal bloggers I follow have stopped offering RSS feeds. I'm not going to mention them because I don't know whether it was their choice or the result of a platform or hosting change that no longer supports RSS or has it turned off by default and it isn't my place to question how they run their sites. I did ask one person I follow about it, and they hadn't really thought about it. They ended up adding a native RSS feed. You can use OpenRSS.org to follow sites that don't offer RSS, but OpenRSS has limited resources.

And apparently, I'm not imagining the broader problem. A recent study by RSSLY found that only 24% of the websites it examined had a discoverable, working RSS feed. It also found that 57% of the websites in its historical comparison that advertised feeds in 2016 no longer advertised them in 2026.¹ Another study by Mark Nottingham identified more than half a million RSS and Atom feeds, but found that only 38.1% had evidence of being updated within the preceding year.²

I just wish more websites would remember that RSS is a simple way for people who actually want to follow them to keep coming back. Hopefully, this isn't really a trend, and it's just me coming across sites whose owners, for one reason or another, didn't realize their RSS feeds were gone. And for businesses, please stop. You generate more goodwill by keeping RSS feeds than by removing them and becoming totally closed off, and it can't be costing you that much in business or resources to provide a feed.

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