This article seems to imply that RSS users need to manually locate the RSS feeds. In all the RSS clients I've used, I just add the site by the main URL and it automatically finds the RSS feed if there is one, and this almost always works.
- Using the iOS Safari share button to “Open in NetNewsWire” would silently fail if the blog didn’t have a feed. I went looking for my feeds later and they were missing. I tried a few more times before realizing, “oh, there’s just no feed.”
- Some sites I found had multiple feed links (one per kind of post: long post, short fragments, photo posts). NetNewsWire would always pick the first link in the page, disregarding all others, and not telling me that the page had multiple.
We can say “discovery is not a problem” but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask for it to be better. Half the value proposition of sites like Substack is making it dead simple for readers to understand how they can subscribe.
As someone who had never used RSS before and didn’t know how to expect RSS to work, it was the problem that grated me the most. If discovery isn’t seamless, only the people determined to use RSS will stick with it after their friends pester them to try it out.
Side note: I kind of wish these “rss is back” posts that were referenced in this article contained “hey here’s my rss subscription list.” Because I’d like to learn about new cool stuff to subscribe to.
Additionally, the social features the OP mentions are helpful in determining which RSS feed is the right one since some sites have multiple.