Two Waves and a Dot

Is Atom better than RSS?

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 09:52:51 GMT

There is this old argument about whether Atom is really superior to RSS. It comes back every once in a while, and also this weekend on Hacker News. Like so often, the central point is the format and encoding of texts and dates. Here, the main example is the <title> element. This is my comment on the original article:

I agree that Atom is easier to use and better defined in some ways. But why on earth would you want to put unrestricted HTML in the title in the first place? How is a reader supposed to handle that? It's just a weird thing to allow.

In practice, the differences between the syndication formats don't really matter. Today even less than when they were created, as a solution for most of the differences is just a prompt away.

In my humble opinion, JSON Feed (https://www.jsonfeed.org/version/1.1/) is the most practical format. By a small margin, but still...

it's really simple and doesn't use XML
it doesn't allow bad things like HTML in titles (which I guarantee >50% of all implementations can't handle correctly)
JSON Feed allows feeds to have a <favicon> and a (square!) <icon>, which is a very practical thing for readers. You can use the <favicon> in lists of feeds, and the <icon> to present a single feed. Atom has a small square icon and a <logo> which is supposed to use a 2:1 aspect ratio. 2:1 is completely useless. No site has a logo in 2:1. It's also useless for most full-name logos, like 'New York Times'. (RSS is, of course, even worse; it doesn't even recommend an aspect ratio, practically guaranteeing that RSS readers can look bad.)

You can see that JSON Feed has been designed from a feed consumer's point of view: what does an RSS reader need to make a feed look good? While Atom and RSS have been written from an abstract publisher's point of view, making everything possible and allowing maximum flexibility. Especially RSS, which has shown its flexibility in becoming the de facto format for podcasts. And both Atom and RSS are really old, written at a time when it probably wasn't clear how RSS would eventually be used.

In the end, no matter which format a feed uses, users won't notice any difference (as long as publishers are smart enough to use square images!). So any feed is a win, no matter whether RSS, Atom, or JSON Feed.

How RSS Disappeared from the Mainstream

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:13:49 GMT

There was a time, back in the 2000s and early 2010s, when RSS was nearly mainstream. All enthusiasts knew it, and most used it. Websites prominently featured their RSS buttons. Web browsers had built-in RSS support. And Google Reader made RSS accessible to regular users. But what happened?

RSS Logo

The End of Google Reader

Google shut down Reader, removed RSS support from Chrome, and RSS became hard to use for most users. Most likely, Google Reader was an expensive distraction for Google that didn't generate any revenue. Back then, social networks were all the rage, and Google wanted a share of the pie with Google+. For a while, it looked like social media could replace RSS readers, and user numbers were declining as people spent more time on social networks. Of course, that was at a time when social networks weren't really monetized either and didn't have nearly the volume of advertisements they have today.

Without Google, not only did the biggest brand name supporting RSS disappear. The remaining RSS readers were mostly designed for enthusiasts. Capable, but packed with complicated features mostly relevant to power users, full of jargon and with less user-friendly design. Like many others, I switched to Feedly back then, as it was the most similar available reader and they made it easy to migrate. But today, it looks like Feedly has mostly pulled out of the market and pivoted to the more profitable market of threat intelligence. Feedly can still be used as an RSS reader, but go to their website, and you see a threat intelligence tool, not a reader.

RSS Readers from a Beginner's Perspective

Let's say you've heard about RSS readers being a great invention, and you Google it. This is what Google returns:

Your first hit is rssview.app. You open it, and this is what you see: Technically, it's an interesting reader that allows you to read a feed without logging in. But for a new user, that's just incomprehensible mumbo jumbo with no easy way of understanding how this can work. Just want to read the New York Times? Not a chance!

Current RSS Readers Are for Power Users

Thankfully, Google's AI Overview lists some popular RSS readers. The first one is Inoreader. Arguably the most powerful reader on the market, and with a generous free plan. But I'm not sure this landing page, and especially the screenshot, appeals to non-technical first-time users of RSS. Without any doubt, Inoreader is a great product for power users. But it's not an attractive product for first-time users.

NewsBlur is similar. It's more like a power tool, designed for maximum functionality, not for usability.

NetNewsWire's simple interface is closer to a feed reader that is easy to use. Without any doubt, it is simple and clean. It just doesn't make it easy for the user. There is no catalog of feeds, no help managing feeds, and no web version.

The Content Publisher Dilemma

However, RSS readers are far from the only challenge for RSS. The sad truth is, it's hard to make money from offering an RSS feed, especially for ad-financed sites. While RSS feeds can generate additional traffic for articles, at the same time, every user who does not visit the site's homepage is a user who won't see the site's ads.

The case is even more difficult for publishers who publish not just summaries or headlines, but whole articles through RSS. These publishers will see zero revenue from RSS. At best, they can place some affiliate links.

In the end, it's also a blessing that the number of RSS users is not that significant, as the possible loss in ad revenue stays low that way. If most users used RSS, there would be much more scrutiny about the cost and benefit of RSS feeds, and we might end up with fewer RSS feeds than today.

How Can RSS Get (Back) to Mainstream Users?

I believe there are two things missing for RSS to really thrive.

ubiquitous RSS readers: just look at podcast apps. They come with phones; they are bundled in services like Spotify; and they are easy to use. Everybody is just a click or two away from listening to a podcast. Reading an RSS feed is far more complicated. Either RSS readers must be as widespread as podcast apps, or there needs to be a well-known RSS reader that everybody can easily find.
a business model for feeds: this may be the bigger issue. Many feeds just offer summaries, so they can create revenue with users on their own website. Some sites offer full-text feeds for subscribers (like The Verge does), but this is rare. An easy system to allow publishers to get paid when a user reads their feed would go a long way in motivating them to promote their RSS feeds.

Until we have at least one of those things, ideally both, RSS readers will stay a niche product.

Post image at the top by Ashley Dryden, licensed CC BY 2.0 Attribution

About Two Waves and a Dot

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 12:39:31 GMT

Hi,

Human here! I just wanted to give you some background on this blog, why it exists, and how everything came together. Just be aware that you are reading this weeks after I originally wrote it, in July 2026. I’m a bit of a serial project abandoner. More on that later, but I promised myself I would not publish a new blog before I am 100% sure that I have gathered enough content to make it a worthwhile effort. Thankfully, these days, AI makes it easier for me to get out of the slump that I fall into every time a project goes from being fun to being serious work. As you are reading this, it looks like I made it.

So the story of me and RSS.. I must have started using RSS in the very early 2000s. No idea what I was using then to consume it, probably Mozilla Thunderbird, but this doesn’t really matter to this story. So I was consuming lots of feeds at that time, and I also had a slightly successful gadget review blog on Blogger, which I (you guessed it) abandoned a long, long time ago. Just like I had a full Slashdot-like site for tech interviews ready, with RSS and Atom feed generation, but abandoned it when it came to actually filling it with content and talking to humans (bleh!). Anyways, I had already been exposed to RSS a lot, both as a consumer and producer.

When, in 2005, Google Reader came out, it was a revelation. Back then, existing RSS readers were better than visiting websites one by one, but they weren’t really a joy to use. Google Reader was. So these were the happy days, when RSS was easy and was slowly entering the mainstream. For personal reasons, like meeting my future wife, it was also the time when I stopped working on any new content projects, but I was an avid user of Google Reader. Generally, even today, I am spending a significant part of my waking hours reading things on the internet, and an RSS reader makes it so much easier.

And then, in 2013, it all ended: Google Reader was shut down. My first reaction was to create a new reader on my own. Only this was the time when my wife and I got our first kids, and I was smart enough to know that creating a cloud-based RSS reader was an enormous task that I would never be able to complete. So I moved to Feedly quickly, since they made the migration easy. And Feedly works fine. I never loved it like I loved Google Reader. But, on the other hand, it worked and was better than visiting websites one by one. So I kept using it for quite a while. Till 2026, actually. Always thinking of what I would like to improve, but also knowing that I had no realistic chance to build this on the side, and whatever I started would just end up as another corpse on my list of abandoned projects.

Last year, near the end of 2025, I was still working on a different project, and realized that Claude Code is now so advanced that I had a realistic chance of creating the RSS reader that I really wanted in 3-4 months. So I did what I always do, ~~abandoned~~ paused my existing project, and started to work on a new one. And because all (really all!) good .com domain names that contain words like “read” or “feed” are long gone, I settled on the last remaining one: downread.com.

I am now near the end of month number 8, so the 4 months didn’t quite hold. In my defense, it was already very usable after 4 months. Just not ready to release. There are so many usable RSS readers already out there that I decided that I need to create one that really feels superior - people usually don’t give products a second chance.

But coming back to this blog: during the last 8 months, I have read countless blogs, looked at countless other RSS readers, and I am keeping up with what is happening with RSS… it currently even feels like there is some momentum. Or maybe I just feel like this because I am spending so much time actively looking out for anything anyone ever says about RSS. Anyway, I thought I should use this to create a central source of information for the RSS community, because there isn’t one yet. And also, as a side-effect, to have a channel to promote my RSS reader just a little bit. I am really not going to talk about it here unless I have a big announcement. It will have its own blog. So this will be a neutral blog, about RSS, Atom, JSON feeds… and whatever info I come across on my journey.

Tim