Sites That Lack RSS Feeds in 2023 Render Themselves Obsolete, a Niche
Check your feeds
ABOUT 20 years ago WordPress picked up and spread RSS feeds to millions of sites (we last mentioned this a week ago; remember that WordPress was just a 'twist' on b2, a French project that had adopted PHP). It wasn't just WordPress though. Back then even Mozilla was promoting RSS feeds, partly through Firefox integration (e.g. "Live" Bookmarks).
Now that social control media is collapsing (a dying trend, a passing fad) all those "follow us in Twitter" sites suffer a lot. They lose their audience.
In our efforts to still keep on top of what's left of the news, including thousands of WordPress blogs that are relevant to us, we've adopted RSS feeds and are processing them to lower the noise/SPAM before checking them, curating them, commenting on them. Sadly, WordPress deteriorated in the sense that it became bloatware and the number of sites that produce news is fast decreasing (some become noise, not news).
In our weekly shuffle we need to manually check various "Linux" blogs [1, 2, 3] because they lack RSS feeds (we've already tried everything, even URI hacking). Some are sheltered behind malicious JavaScript walls and some require searching manually for relevant material (if any). It's an awful state of affairs. They lack RSS feeds. Checking a tag or a category by hand takes time, so some of those we only check once a month, even if they don't have a monthly publication pattern like the PCLinuxOS Magazine, which incidentally lacks an RSS feed. Why, oh, why?
It's not too shocking that sites which lack an RSS feed become less active. There are no returning visitors or steady traffic. This site publishes very seldom and this one fell off the rails. The bottom line is, for sites to thrive, not just survive, they need to adopt RSS feeds. They may perish quickly without them. Broadcasting site updates via social control media is not a substitute; it's just tying one's fate to some potentially hostile private businesses that censor, collude, or sell to Elon Muscovite - a professional fraud and a liar. █