Chrome's experimental "Follow" feature

Does this mean that in the 2020s RSS is back?!

[ronin]

Back in 2004, I loved RSS (and Atom).

I thought that Feed Subscription was going to obsolete Email Subscription because it was so easy to turn on and off. (Remember that this was a time when you never knew if clicking "Unsubscribe" at the bottom of an email wasn't simply going to ensure that your email address was added to countless more spam lists.)

Regrettably (I thought so anyway) a lot of commercial organisations decided they preferred Email Subscription because their messages couldn't be turned off quite so easily by subscribers.

I thought that was a lost opportunity.

But it seems, in 2021, Google might be interested in Feed Subscription again. (Possibly as a way to compete FB & Twitter?)

Will this spark a long-awaited renaissance of decentralised feeds?

[theverge.com...]

[arstechnica.com...]

[tomsguide.com...]

[edited by: ronin at 11:30 am (utc) on May 22, 2021]

[JorgeV]

Hello,

[webmasterworld.com...]

[ronin]

Thanks @JorgeV - I didn't realise we were already talking about this.

However, I'm less interested in Google Chrome (not a browser I've ever really used).

I am interested - and, hopefully, I'm not alone in this - in the potential renaissance of RSS and Atom Feeds in the 2020s.

[not2easy]

It isn't gone, but less visible than it once was. From about a year ago: [webmasterworld.com...]

[JorgeV]

Hello -again,

I love to see RSS resurrected, I remember the hype about it, an then how it faded, because of social networks (in my opinion).

Also, SEO "experts" will be be able to publish tons of articles on how to do RSS, optimize them, and so on, it will add a bit of "old freshness" to their portfolio.

[JorgeV]

When you read this :

Several major sites such as Facebook and Twitter previously offered RSS feeds but have reduced or removed support. Additionally, widely used readers such as Shiira, FeedDemon, and Google Reader have been discontinued having cited declining popularity in RSS. RSS support was removed in OS X Mountain Lion's versions of Mail and Safari, although the features were partially restored in Safari 8. Mozilla removed RSS support from Mozilla Firefox version 64.0, joining Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge which do not include RSS support, thus leaving Internet Explorer as the last major browser to include RSS support by default.
[en.wikipedia.org...]

And may be all this will be reverted :) ... After all, it was Internet Explorer which was right :)