I like RSS and Atom a lot, so I say this with a heavy heart: I don't think there's a real RSS renaissance going on. It's just one of the early-aughts standards that HN pines for and loves promoting think-pieces about, in part because it allows us to all put rose-tinted glasses on and pretend that the Internet isn't a hellscape of our own design.
See also: IRC, which I also like, but whose demise is fully complete. RSS isn't quite as dead as IRC, but it's on the way out.
Hard disagree. As Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram become increasingly ad-laden and non-chronological, the real value of RSS becomes more and more obvious. I may exist on the fringe as someone who doesn't use any non-HN social media, but I know several businesses in my city that have cropped up in the last 2 or 3 years that basically only pushed out information on Facebook and Instagram. Since those services don't guarantee that your posts will ever make it to followers, much less in a timely fashion, those businesses have really struggled when they have to announce things day-of, or even the day before something happens (closing due to snow, or a party; changing their hours; removing something from the menu due to a supply chain problem; etc.). I've seen a lot of these businesses die, and I suspect Facebook and Instagram contribute. It's not that RSS would save these businesses. But it is true that if you build castles on the sand of another company, you have nobody to blame when your castle collapses.
I don't think we actually disagree: there's plenty of "real value" in RSS, real value that I extract both as a user (I use newsboat[1]) and a producer (I maintain an Atom feed for my blog).
The problem isn't that RSS isn't good or useful, it's that it doesn't fit into the incentive structures that we've bought into. An Internet in which RSS thrives is not one in which John Q. Programmer makes 250k a year at Facebook or Google.
I can't speak for myself (I don't listen to that many podcasts), but my friends who do seem to do so mostly through Apple's Podcast app, Spotify, or a similar service.
RSS might be providing the syndication under the hood to these services, but it's firmly an implementation detail at this point and not a thriving protocol/community in its own right. Which isn't to say that I want it to fail or be replaced with something else, either!
Yeah, I provide an Atom feed for my blog. It has about ~100 subscribers across a few different RSS subscription services, and I get a few hundred independent RSS client requests a week. Don't get me wrong: it all works really well, and I like providing it! But it's a very small fraction of my overall traffic, and other bloggers I've spoken to have indicated the same.
How do you tell, technically speaking, that someone is subscribed to your feed? Is it logging requests of the RSS feed url somehow?
Doesnt Feedly, for one, aggregate RSS subscriptions for all of its users? If I were subscribed to your blog through Feedly, would you see me as an individual subscriber, or all of your Feedly subscribers as one subscriber? If so, I imagine this would deflate your numbers.
I'm not sure it is a community in the sense that you or your friends would recognize, but it is there. I use AntennaPod, and it relies quite a lot on RSS and Atom feeds, as do other podcast apps.. Submitting your podcast to major services like Apple iTunes using RSS is not a mere implementation detail, but a de facto standard.
I spend a lot of time on IRC, including in some of the chats for some of the largest OSS projects. I even still run my own social channel and maintain a bouncer for myself and friends!
Pockets of activity don't mean that IRC as a whole isn't dead, the same way that the Pope doesn't make Latin a living language.
IRC has quite a few active users which is not what I'd call "dead". It's true that it's not as ubiquitous as it used to be, but it certainly still fills a certain niche.
I'm one of those active users. Perhaps "dead-end" is more accurate; I'll be on it until the networks I'm on turn off, but newcomers are a rarity these days.
Is that how most people are currently following podcasts? I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I hate to admit that I do this mainly through YouTube and sometimes Spotify, maybe Podbean. It's been many years since I subscribed to an RSS feed using a podcast app.
See also: IRC, which I also like, but whose demise is fully complete. RSS isn't quite as dead as IRC, but it's on the way out.