The open web forgot about feeds, and that is worth fixing
Feeds let you publish once and let anything read it. As they eroded, following became an account on someone else's platform. Owning what you read is independence.
Feeds were the quiet machinery that kept the web interoperable: publish once, and anything could read it. RSS and Atom meant a site, a reader, and a robot could all agree on the same stream without asking permission. That bargain eroded. Many sites ship no feed at all now, and “follow us” quietly became “create an account on someone else’s platform”. Reclaiming feeds, and owning what you read, is a small but real act of independence, and it is worth fixing.
What did feeds actually give us?
A feed is a promise of interoperability. The publisher exposes their content in a plain, open format, and the reader chooses how to consume it: which app, what order, no algorithm in between. Nobody had to integrate with anybody. You published once and the open web took care of the rest.
That decoupling is the whole point. Your reading list was yours. It lived in your reader, not in a company’s database, and it survived that company changing its mind, its ranking, or its business model. The feed did not care who was reading or why, which is exactly what made it durable.
Why did the web drift away from them?
Platforms had every incentive to close the loop. A feed lets you leave. An account does not. So the industry replaced “here is my stream, read it however you like” with “log in to see updates”, and a generation of sites simply stopped publishing feeds because the platform was where the audience was.
The cost is subtle but real. When following someone means an account on a platform, you do not own that relationship. The platform mediates it, ranks it, and can end it. You are renting your reading. The open format that asked nothing of you got swapped for a login that asks for everything.
How do we get feeds back?
We make owning your reading easy again. That means tooling that treats feeds as a first-class citizen: aggregate sources you choose, normalise them into one stream, and keep that stream under your control rather than a platform’s. It is not nostalgia. It is infrastructure for independence.
That motivation is exactly why I built Neurowire as open source under Starside Labs: a feed-first reader that puts you back in charge of what you follow, now available as a hosted app at neurowire.app. I wrote about the thinking when the Neurowire docs launched, and the full documentation lives at neurowire.starside.io.
The open web did not need permission to be interoperable. Feeds were how it stayed that way, and choosing to publish and read through open feeds is how we keep that choice alive.