RSS was supposed to be dead by 2013. It didn't get the message. The reader I use today subscribes to about fifty feeds and shows me, in chronological order, what those people published. No algorithm. No ads. No engagement nudges.

Most of the writing I genuinely care about reaches me through RSS. The platforms come and go; the feeds outlast them.

Two reasons RSS keeps surviving:

1. The standard is open and stable. Nobody can EOL it.
2. Personal sites — the kind that survive the rise and fall of Twitter, Substack, Medium — almost always still emit a feed. So RSS is the lowest-common-denominator subscription mechanism for the writing that matters most.

The default Quartz setup emits one without any work. If you publish on the open web, please keep yours alive. Your handful of regular readers will thank you, even if they're invisible to your analytics.

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