I ditched the algorithm for RSS

The one thing that kills me is the number of "modern" blogs/sites that don't offer rss or atom is really frustrating. If I really like your site, please let me be an engaged reader and let me know when you have something valuable to say again!

I've even resorted to adding features in my personal feedreader to seek out common feed locations or APIs that common blogging tools leave on mostly unnoticed.

My SSG (Zola) offers an RSS generation option, so I turned it on. Several months later I realized it was broken for some reason and I hadn't noticed.

Nobody emailed me or anything (I'm not a popular blogger), so I just turned the RSS generation off

No blog is worth the hassle and honestly there is always a feed broken somewhere showing up in our reader we just wait for them to fix it. If they don't fix it then at some point it will just get deleted. That is just the reality of maintaining your own feed websites remove feeds sometimes and all you can do is go back see if its changed address and if not remove it.

Back like 15 to 20 years ago when I ran or helped manage some hobbyist websites, I added RSS functionality if only because it was "popular" back then.

I can confidently tell you not a single bloody soul used it, at the height of adoption no less.

If I run a website again I definitely won't bother, it's additional maintenance for a feature nobody uses. The cost-to-benefit ratio makes no sense because the benefit is zero.

But it's so little hassle: just send the blog author an email saying vaguely what the problem is!

Someone emailed me about an issue with my RSS feed once. I don't remember what the issue was anymore, but I was grateful and I fixed it. Being the author of a tiny blog, it was just really nice to know that someone wanted to read what I wrote enough to care that my RSS feed was borked.

In an effort to bypass Google News and broaden my media bubble - I tried to find RSS feeds from our national newspapers. Most had RSS at some point, but almost none still had it running.

I’m carrying my feed subscription list from reader to reader since 2002 – and every few years I’m thinking of thinning the list of long defunct blogs or at least look where they are now. Then I do something different instead.

I regularly get emails from people asking where my RSS feed is on my site (or why I don’t have one) when every page on it has the link tags in the header that allow it to be autodiscovered.

It heavily depends on the target audience, I'd say. Especially if it's not ubiquitous.

The audience was hobbyist game developers and people generally interested in computers, so if they didn't use RSS then frankly I don't know who will (and clearly, speaking now in the future, noone has).

Autodiscovery pretty much died when browsers removed RSS. It's a shame, really.

I do use an RSS reader but because of the nature of the modern internet, it's a separate app.