RSS does not decide what you should care about next.
It delivers updates from sources you already chose.
That sounds almost too simple now. A site publishes a feed. A reader subscribes. New entries appear in the reader. Depending on the software, they may be shown newest-first, grouped by source, filtered by rules, or otherwise organized by the user rather than by a platform’s central home-feed ranking.
The format itself remains actively maintained. The RSS Advisory Board continues to publish and support the RSS specifications and related guidance.
Subscription and discovery are different jobs
RSS is excellent at continuity.
Once you find a useful independent site, podcast, newsletter archive, or project blog with a feed, RSS can keep that source in your daily information environment without requiring the source to win a fresh ranking contest every time it publishes.
That changes the power relationship considerably.
A followed site cannot suddenly disappear because its latest post underperformed on engagement. The feed reader does not need to infer whether you are still interested. You subscribed. The update arrives.
But RSS does not solve the first half of the problem.
You still have to discover the source.
That discovery may come from search, a blogroll, a webring, a friend’s recommendation, a directory, a forum post, or pure accident. RSS becomes useful after that moment.
Reader control has costs too
A feed list can become overwhelming.
Subscribe to 300 prolific sites and a chronological reader can produce its own version of information overload. High-volume publishers dominate simply by publishing more. Quiet but valuable sources can still get buried under unread counts.
Different readers address this with folders, filters, starring, priority views, or manual cleanup. The important difference is that those controls are generally explicit and local to the reader.
The user can see the subscription list.
They can remove a source.
They can decide whether oldest or newest comes first.
That does not make RSS neutral. It makes the selection rule easier to understand.
A feed can preserve a relationship with a site
This matters for independent publishing because ranking systems repeatedly force small sites to re-earn visibility.
RSS allows a one-time discovery event to become an ongoing direct connection.
For Dead Internet Theory, that is useful because a site can appear to vanish from someone’s internet without disappearing from the web at all. It may simply stop surfacing in ranked feeds and ordinary search.
RSS offers a blunt alternative:
Find the site once.
Then stop asking an algorithm for permission to see it again.