Chris Aldrich: Am I on the IndieWeb Yet?

Chris Coyier made a point of replying on his personal site – a lovely little post about how cool RSS is, and the benefits of “slow social” web interactions. And I agree completely! [insert requisite mourning for Reader]

I’m linking to this article mostly because it’s become a pet peeve of mine when I see people mourn the discontinuation of Google Reader as The End of RSS or something like that. It’s been 9 years since Google ended the product and people act as though RSS died with it.

Yes, people don’t follow blogs with RSS readers the same way today that they did a decade ago, but Google Reader was succeeded by a whole host of alternatives, all of which remain today I would argue are better than the Google Reader we left behind. I’d also be willing to be that Feedly, the most mainstream option today, has more users than Google Reader ever did.

RSS is great, and I use it every single day, just like I have for the past…15 years or so, but I really think we put too much of the seemingly niche use case of following RSS feeds directly in 2022 on Google discontinuing their reader in 2013.

If anyone has numbers to sway this opinion, I’d love to see them, of course!