I think a lot of people think RSS is dead because they never see it promoted anywhere. Pretty much every web site has a row of social media icons, but hardly ever is there an RSS icon in the row, even if the web site supports it.
Frankly, I don't think most people who run web sites even know that the framework/CMS/rolfburger they're using automatically publishes RSS feeds for them.
Yesterday I stumbled across an app called Fraidy Cat, which is supposed to be a privacy-focused news ingester. I haven't done much with it yet, but I was surprised when I pasted in the URLs of several newspapers that I read, the program showed RSS feeds for all of them. None of the paper web sites have any mention of RSS at all.
The NYTimes is actually an example that undermines the ideals of RSS for the average web surfer who is not a tech geek.
The NYTimes RSS feeds are not full texts of the article such that a one can read the entire story within the comfort of the RSS reader. NYTimes only provides snippets and excerpts to bait people to click on to the real web page. For many normal people, this crippled functionality of article summaries in RSS is worthless to them.
Yes, many low-traffic WordPress sites still give RSS feeds of full text but that's not going to reverse the decline of RSS.
Again, I emphasize and concede that many hardcore web surfers (e.g. HN users in this thread) still find the limited RSS summaries useful because they don't have to "visit 100 websites" but that's not a problem the mass population has[0]. This "go-to-our-real-website-to-see-the-entire-article" amplifies the trend of RSS declining in popularity. If RSS is just "teasers", the typical web surfers would rather get their "aggregation" from Facebook or just use the NYTimes smartphone app which has enhanced rich content such as video, etc.
The publishers of popular mainstream websites simply don't have any economic incentive (i.e. ads) to give readers the full text in their RSS feeds.
I still contend that a bunch of RSS enthusiasts in this thread talking about how they use RSS doesn't answer actual the question the HN poster asked. The actual question is about mainstream trends and not about the habits of HN hardcore users. Take another look at the words used in the Ask HN question. HN users don't need to "hope" for a new web or smartphone RSS client. They're already using RSS right now!
[0] similar example previous comment from 9 years ago that makes a distinction between "normal mainstream" web surfers and hardcore RSS enthusiasts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060707
So, I do find that behavior annoying, but I wouldn't call it worthless. I still get a list of articles that I can skim through fairly quickly, and, while one more click to get to the full article is a (very) mild inconvenience, it hardly eliminates the value of the RSS Feed.
It is admittedly more of an issue in airplanes. But I'm disinclined to throw out the baby over a few hours per year's worth of bathwater.
There are ways around this. I use ttrss and it has the option to fetch the actual page and replace the RSS content with it. It has a few bugs with formatting and such on some sites, but generally works well. There is a built in Readability plugin for it, but I also use a plugin called Mercury full text for some feeds that don't play nicely with Readability.
Mercury works better than Readability usually, but the downside is that Mercury uses a third party to process it, whereas Readability is all local. So some sites will block Mercury from accessing it, because it's seen as a bot (Forbes does this, as do a few other sites).
This combo works great for reading entirely in your RSS reader. I use my phone to download my feeds for offline before flights, so I can read the actual content as well without an Internet connection (assuming it doesn't have formatting errors).
I use feedly myself which pulls in articles via RSS. I even got into this thread with an RSS link. Frankly, it's a great resource to keep up with different blogs and sites without having them all live in your bookmarks bar.
I put together a list of popular US newspapers with RSS feeds in OPML format a few years ago. I haven't checked to see if any of them have gone dead yet though. https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml
might be useful for people trying to start a collection of feeds
I had a few emails recently asking if my site had an RSS feed. I have never used RSS and had no idea. Went into Squarespace settings, messed around for 2 mins, it gave me a button and set it all up for me. Honestly I thought it was already dead until I had those emails come in...
When sending such emails I always include a tiny example of a minimum item rss feed. "If you take whatever code you have that spits out text files that are html documents it shouldn't take long to have it spit out text files that are rss feeds."
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>hacker news</title>
<link>https://news.ycombinator.com</link>
<description>Description of website</description>
<item>
<title>newest article title</title>
<link>https:// link to article</link>
<description>first few lines of article</description>
<pubDate>Publication timestamp according to RFC 822 like: Thu, 1 Apr 2060</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>slightly older article title</title>
<link>https:// link to article</link>
<description>first few lines of article</description>
<pubDate>Date</pubDate>
</item>
<!-- and any number of extra <item>'s here. -->
</channel>
</rss>
Then include this some place in the head of the index for auto discovery.
The number of items suggested in the email should depend on the type of website. If it is a news website 1 day should be fine. A busy forum the most recent 20 or 30 items. Be biased about it :0)
There is lots more to know about feeds but the above is really all they need to use it. Things like, pubDate is not required but a feed without it isn't worth much. RSS aggregators should accept RFC 822 dates with 2 year digits. They don't have to know that. Such details only make implementation less likely.
Ooh, i stumbled across this one site that I wanted to add to my feed reader, didn't find <link rel="alternative"> tags in the header, but a <link rel="https://api.w.org/"> tag. I'm not sure it is their intention to open up the WordPress back-end, but I found how to get the list of articles from it, so added support for it to my own feed-reader: https://github.com/stijnsanders/feeder#feeder
One of the early advantages of Wordpress was precisely its excellent support of all formats of feeds out of the box, back in the hot days of the Rss/Atom feud.
New York Times actually has a page listing all their feeds, and updates that page as they change sections. There’s a lot of overlap, of course, natural for a site of their size.
Opened this post using RSS in Inoreader. All my news comes via RSS. I use it for news sites, I use it for Medium and I also use it for Reddit. The nice thing about it, is that everything stays in one place, categorized and I can see unread counts. Especially useful while checking reddit feeds. There's no infinite scroll and I can clearly see/mark what's been read and what's not. I can come back later and continue from where I left or review my favorites. If the site does not have RSS, or I can't make it appear in Inoreader - most likely I won't be visiting it again, or at least not scrolling daily. RSS gives you freedom and saves you a lot of time.
By asking the question using the word "dead"[0] which has such offensive connotations, it will spur some to say "it's not dead" -- which isn't really going to be productive for what I think you're really asking.
First, in one sense (but doesn't really answer your question) ... the old protocols like RSS (feeds), NNTP (news), IRC (chat), etc are never going to be "dead" because somebody somewhere will always be providing it and somebody somewhere will always be consuming it. Just like horse & buggies are not truly "dead" because a few are being run for tourists and the Amish communities, there are some old dialup BBS's serving callers with old modems even though the internet+web has supplanted it.
I think the longer form of your question for productive discussion is this: Is RSS usage decline possible to reverse with new clients on the web & mobile?
The answer is no. RSS/NNTP/IRC don't have the incentives (both economic and social) that allow them to experience a renaissance. E.g. StackOverflow may someday be supplanted by another Q&A site but it won't be supplanted by NNTP news forums. Same with RSS. Typical mass consumers use Facebook as their "rss" reader. It won't matter what kind of new RSS reader you develop, the typical web surfers don't want to manage RSS feeds.
[0] to the replies below about why "dead" often triggers unproductive arguments:
In observing decades of debates on USENET,BBSs,web, etc... the word "dead" has 2 very different meanings which needlessly causes participants to talk right past each other.
meaning #1: "dead" is harmless synonym for "decline", "losing popularity", "no longer supported", "no longer in mainstream use", etc.
meaning #2: "dead" is provocative synonym for "no longer worth learning", "useless", "stopped working forever", "nobody intelligent is using it", etc.
The amazing phenomenon that happens with asking "Is X Dead?" is that the question asker is almost always innocently using meaning #1 but the most enthusiastic answerers are using meaning #2. This is why "dead" triggers unproductive threads because both sides are talking past each other with different semantics of "dead".
RSS does play a growing role in a few places: podcasts [1] and virtual assistant apps (e.g. Alexa [2], Google Home[3], etc.) Although in both cases consumers do not tend to have direct access to it.
I'm not sure its role is growing. I fret a bit about Spotify and Stitcher becoming the defacto place to discover and consume podcasts, because podcasts seem to be the last bastion of steady RSS usage.
While I agree with everything you wrote, I think it is fair to add that an eventual demise does not mean it is quite dead yet, especially among the HN audience. I use RSS to follow a number of blogs and I know that a lot of other nerds follow some of my stuff using the RSS feed. It works just fine and until it gets replaced, a new client might receive a warm welcome by this large-in-absolute-numbers audience.
> meaning #1: "dead" is harmless synonym for "decline", "losing popularity", "no longer supported", "no longer in mainstream use", etc.
> meaning #2: "dead" is provocative synonym for "no longer worth learning", "useless", "stopped working forever", "nobody intelligent is using it", etc.
IMO if you can identify two major audiences who will have two different interpretations for your statements, then both interpretations are simultaneously "live" for your context. It is for that reason that Group #2 should always rise to the defense of a technology they don't want derided as terribly useless. It doesn't matter if Group #1 meant something else, because they weren't in full control of their meaning as they spoke into a larger audience.
This is a really great answer and analysis. By my rough estimate 90% of internet arguments boil down to people using different definitions of the same word and talking past each other.
I don't think you can meaningfully talk about this without distinguishing between user facing applications and server to server aggregation.
RSS/Atom serves a purpose in federation of content that is not necessarily visible to people so much any more.
We spoke about RSS and Atom more before in part because it wasn't ubiquitous, but today it's almost hard to find a blogging platform or CMS that is post oriented that doesn't expose feed endpoints by default - I have a hobby project that relies on feeds to aggregate content, and the proportion of sites I've wanted to add that has lacked feed is miniscule. It's become boring plumbing.
At the same time we have gotten more ways of consuming aggregated content. Some uses feeds, some rely on social aggregation. Combined that may have reduced the number proportion of users that run apps that hit feeds direction rather than seeing the content elsewhere. That's fine. But at the same time my impression at least is that a large proportion of clients accessing feeds are doing it on behalf of services rather than end users.
I don't think the word itself is what's offensive; rather it's connecting it to a particular thing which some people cherish. If I'm a fan of ska music and active in that scene, I'm obviously going to take umbrage with "ska is dead", even if it's vastly less popular than its apex. And "dead" is clearly an exaggerated euphemism in the vast majority of cases: even "Latin is a dead language" isn't strictly true.
"Dead" may not be intrinsically offensive, but in practice "X is dead" is at least triggering (by the casual/mild definition of the term). :)
I think what's really prevented RSS from recovering after the death of Google Reader is the cultural shift toward content farms. Most news sites have started to publish as many articles as possible to drive as much ad revenue as possible; unfortunately, most RSS platforms still treat every entry in a feed as equally important as another. IOW, if you add something like Engadget to your feed reader, be prepared to be flooded by nothing but their content.
This is what Facebook and Twitter are good at and why people are choosing it for consuming news: they recommend relevant content. If feed readers are to take off today, I think figuring out a way to promote posts from my feeds that I'd find relevant is key; this sounds like something Fever[1] was good at, although I was never interested in self-hosting it.
Sidenote: it seems like an obvious play for Facebook/Twitter to add a toggle to filter their algorithmic feeds to just news to become a hub for personalized information.
In a certain sense Google Reader killed a lot of RSS feeds and users because it was an excellent passive content distribution platform which hurts the ad revenue stream f Google. Google requires maximal active engagement of people. If people start getting stuff news etc passively why would people go to the default search engine?
The fact that 2/3rd of the answers - so far - to your post seems to completely miss the point and some are even back to arguing about the definition of `dead` or RSS's relevance as a tech running thing in the background is... depressing.
"Unproductive for discussion", then. Calling RSS "dead" will offend people who are partial to it, because there are fanboys everywhere, and that's not going to lead to a particularly useful discussion.
Asking if something is "dead" generally offends people passionate about that thing, as to them it's obviously not dead, which makes them passionately defend that it's NOT "dead".
For my part I'm currently building and updating a feedreader / feedparser kit that lets you build a newsfeed in minutes [1] or use a ready-made client such as rubynews [2]
RSS the protocol, or RSS the experience?
The Protocol is alive and kicking, as far as being available, but it's been more or less killed by publishers not promoting it out of the box. AFAIK ad revenue is basically the reason.
The replacement set of broadcast tools is still Facebook, Twitter, Direct, and Newsletters. Newsletters are really the new feed.
Inoreader just rolled out a new feature that allows you to subscribe to newsletters directly in their reader and have them available with the rest of your feeds.
Have you heard of podcasts? They're booming and they rely on RSS. The way they're subscribed to and the way they're submitted to large platforms is via their RSS feeds.
The podcast industry might be booming, but the days of nearly every podcast being freely available with an RSS feed is certainly over. Granted this is mostly a business decision rather than a technical decision. Companies like Spotify want you to listen to their podcasts on their platform. This allows them to better track ad statistics and push other revenue streams compared to podcasts served over traditional RSS feeds.
> This allows them to better track ad statistics and push other revenue streams compared to podcasts served over traditional RSS feeds.
It's not just better ad statistics -- with apps like Stitcher/Spotify, the app contains both discovery and download, and also the player. When you listen to podcasts on their apps, they're able to report useful, interesting metrics to podcast producers like skip rate, bounce rate, etc. They're valuable metrics.
As far as I know, podcasts that are distributed by RSS and consumed by the apple podcasts app / any other app don't gather these metrics. There's no reason they couldn't though, because RSS / Atom have plenty of flexibility to add a field for a metric reporting callback/webhook. We could have an open convention for what goes over that webhook, maybe even some competition in providing podcast playback metrics as a service.
(... does this all exist already and I'm just behind the times?)
I have quite a few websites in my RSS Reader (I love TinyTinyRSS) and over the last 2-3 years I've seen probably ~10 sites get "makeovers" and every time, the RSS feed I was using for those sites has gone away/broken.
Each time I've emailed them to ask "Oh hey are you going to bring back RSS" and of the ~4 that replied, 1 bought it back ~3 months later, the other 3 said "Nope, no one uses it" and the others didn't even reply.
So yes, it's on a steep decline I'd say. I love the "But Podcasts use it" argument! There's what, ~100 major podcast sites people use? Yes, RSS is the backend workhorse that makes it work, but the podcast(content) producers aren't using RSS, they'll be uploading their content to a website. RSS is just the backend magic that makes the podcast clients work.
RSS at most sites seems to suffer bitrot. Sometimes the RSS URL is still http when the site has moved to https etc etc.
It's sad to see the decline of it, because an RSS Reader really is a beautiful thing. But yes, RSS as a way to exposing content to people is dying and used by only a very few hardcore "oldschool" people these days I'd suggest.
According to my httpd logs, between 50 and 100 people[1] are fetching my (not particularly popular) blog via RSS daily. That's enough people for it to be (personally) worth ensuring that RSS continues to function.
Whether that meets the standard of being "alive" is probably a community judgement.
[1]: The exact number is hard to get, since a lot of feed hits are for RSS services and not all of them announce their subscriber count in their user agent.
Readit News
Frankly, I don't think most people who run web sites even know that the framework/CMS/rolfburger they're using automatically publishes RSS feeds for them.
Yesterday I stumbled across an app called Fraidy Cat, which is supposed to be a privacy-focused news ingester. I haven't done much with it yet, but I was surprised when I pasted in the URLs of several newspapers that I read, the program showed RSS feeds for all of them. None of the paper web sites have any mention of RSS at all.
Edit: Even the New York Times has RSS:
Latest: https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml
New York: https://www.nytimes.com/section/nyregion
Technology: https://www.nytimes.com/section/technology
Science: https://www.nytimes.com/svc/collections/v1/publish/https://w...
The NYTimes is actually an example that undermines the ideals of RSS for the average web surfer who is not a tech geek.
The NYTimes RSS feeds are not full texts of the article such that a one can read the entire story within the comfort of the RSS reader. NYTimes only provides snippets and excerpts to bait people to click on to the real web page. For many normal people, this crippled functionality of article summaries in RSS is worthless to them.
Yes, many low-traffic WordPress sites still give RSS feeds of full text but that's not going to reverse the decline of RSS.
Again, I emphasize and concede that many hardcore web surfers (e.g. HN users in this thread) still find the limited RSS summaries useful because they don't have to "visit 100 websites" but that's not a problem the mass population has[0]. This "go-to-our-real-website-to-see-the-entire-article" amplifies the trend of RSS declining in popularity. If RSS is just "teasers", the typical web surfers would rather get their "aggregation" from Facebook or just use the NYTimes smartphone app which has enhanced rich content such as video, etc.
The publishers of popular mainstream websites simply don't have any economic incentive (i.e. ads) to give readers the full text in their RSS feeds.
I still contend that a bunch of RSS enthusiasts in this thread talking about how they use RSS doesn't answer actual the question the HN poster asked. The actual question is about mainstream trends and not about the habits of HN hardcore users. Take another look at the words used in the Ask HN question. HN users don't need to "hope" for a new web or smartphone RSS client. They're already using RSS right now!
[0] similar example previous comment from 9 years ago that makes a distinction between "normal mainstream" web surfers and hardcore RSS enthusiasts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060707
It is admittedly more of an issue in airplanes. But I'm disinclined to throw out the baby over a few hours per year's worth of bathwater.
Mercury works better than Readability usually, but the downside is that Mercury uses a third party to process it, whereas Readability is all local. So some sites will block Mercury from accessing it, because it's seen as a bot (Forbes does this, as do a few other sites).
This combo works great for reading entirely in your RSS reader. I use my phone to download my feeds for offline before flights, so I can read the actual content as well without an Internet connection (assuming it doesn't have formatting errors).
might be useful for people trying to start a collection of feeds
I had a few emails recently asking if my site had an RSS feed. I have never used RSS and had no idea. Went into Squarespace settings, messed around for 2 mins, it gave me a button and set it all up for me. Honestly I thought it was already dead until I had those emails come in...
When sending such emails I always include a tiny example of a minimum item rss feed. "If you take whatever code you have that spits out text files that are html documents it shouldn't take long to have it spit out text files that are rss feeds."
Then include this some place in the head of the index for auto discovery. The number of items suggested in the email should depend on the type of website. If it is a news website 1 day should be fine. A busy forum the most recent 20 or 30 items. Be biased about it :0)There is lots more to know about feeds but the above is really all they need to use it. Things like, pubDate is not required but a feed without it isn't worth much. RSS aggregators should accept RFC 822 dates with 2 year digits. They don't have to know that. Such details only make implementation less likely.
https://sputniknews.com/export/rss2/archive/index.xml for example had it up and running 20 min after the mail. They've dressed it up a bit since.
I’ve recently needed to get RSS feeds and a good number of times I can find it via /rss or view the source of the site and search for xml.
These are the major strengths of RSS.
If it’s dead or not, just leave it be for us.
First, in one sense (but doesn't really answer your question) ... the old protocols like RSS (feeds), NNTP (news), IRC (chat), etc are never going to be "dead" because somebody somewhere will always be providing it and somebody somewhere will always be consuming it. Just like horse & buggies are not truly "dead" because a few are being run for tourists and the Amish communities, there are some old dialup BBS's serving callers with old modems even though the internet+web has supplanted it.
I think the longer form of your question for productive discussion is this: Is RSS usage decline possible to reverse with new clients on the web & mobile?
The answer is no. RSS/NNTP/IRC don't have the incentives (both economic and social) that allow them to experience a renaissance. E.g. StackOverflow may someday be supplanted by another Q&A site but it won't be supplanted by NNTP news forums. Same with RSS. Typical mass consumers use Facebook as their "rss" reader. It won't matter what kind of new RSS reader you develop, the typical web surfers don't want to manage RSS feeds.
[0] to the replies below about why "dead" often triggers unproductive arguments:
In observing decades of debates on USENET,BBSs,web, etc... the word "dead" has 2 very different meanings which needlessly causes participants to talk right past each other.
meaning #1: "dead" is harmless synonym for "decline", "losing popularity", "no longer supported", "no longer in mainstream use", etc.
meaning #2: "dead" is provocative synonym for "no longer worth learning", "useless", "stopped working forever", "nobody intelligent is using it", etc.
The amazing phenomenon that happens with asking "Is X Dead?" is that the question asker is almost always innocently using meaning #1 but the most enthusiastic answerers are using meaning #2. This is why "dead" triggers unproductive threads because both sides are talking past each other with different semantics of "dead".
1. https://itunespartner.apple.com/podcasts/articles/creating-y...
2. https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/flashbriefing/...
3. https://developers.google.com/news/assistant/newsbriefings/t...
Now, for the past 6 years, I use RSS as my primary method of downloading podcast episodes and webcomic issues. I'm currently subscribed to about 60.
Dead? No. Declining? I can't say that for myself let alone writ large.
> meaning #2: "dead" is provocative synonym for "no longer worth learning", "useless", "stopped working forever", "nobody intelligent is using it", etc.
IMO if you can identify two major audiences who will have two different interpretations for your statements, then both interpretations are simultaneously "live" for your context. It is for that reason that Group #2 should always rise to the defense of a technology they don't want derided as terribly useless. It doesn't matter if Group #1 meant something else, because they weren't in full control of their meaning as they spoke into a larger audience.
RSS/Atom serves a purpose in federation of content that is not necessarily visible to people so much any more.
We spoke about RSS and Atom more before in part because it wasn't ubiquitous, but today it's almost hard to find a blogging platform or CMS that is post oriented that doesn't expose feed endpoints by default - I have a hobby project that relies on feeds to aggregate content, and the proportion of sites I've wanted to add that has lacked feed is miniscule. It's become boring plumbing.
At the same time we have gotten more ways of consuming aggregated content. Some uses feeds, some rely on social aggregation. Combined that may have reduced the number proportion of users that run apps that hit feeds direction rather than seeing the content elsewhere. That's fine. But at the same time my impression at least is that a large proportion of clients accessing feeds are doing it on behalf of services rather than end users.
"Dead" may not be intrinsically offensive, but in practice "X is dead" is at least triggering (by the casual/mild definition of the term). :)
This is what Facebook and Twitter are good at and why people are choosing it for consuming news: they recommend relevant content. If feed readers are to take off today, I think figuring out a way to promote posts from my feeds that I'd find relevant is key; this sounds like something Fever[1] was good at, although I was never interested in self-hosting it.
Sidenote: it seems like an obvious play for Facebook/Twitter to add a toggle to filter their algorithmic feeds to just news to become a hub for personalized information.
[1]: https://feedafever.com/
The fact that 2/3rd of the answers - so far - to your post seems to completely miss the point and some are even back to arguing about the definition of `dead` or RSS's relevance as a tech running thing in the background is... depressing.
For my part I'm currently building and updating a feedreader / feedparser kit that lets you build a newsfeed in minutes [1] or use a ready-made client such as rubynews [2]
[1]: https://github.com/feedreader/news.rb [2]: https://github.com/planetruby/planet/tree/master/rubynews
PS: The stats on Planet Ruby for RSS vs ATOM are:
Q: What feed formats are in use? Formats (n=51)
The replacement set of broadcast tools is still Facebook, Twitter, Direct, and Newsletters. Newsletters are really the new feed.
I've noticed this as well, and it boggles my mind. If ever there was a use case for RSS, this would be it.
Hence the demand for MailChump, Constant Spammer, and SpamBlast.
Nearly every newsletter I follow also provides an RSS feed though.
Have you heard of podcasts? They're booming and they rely on RSS. The way they're subscribed to and the way they're submitted to large platforms is via their RSS feeds.
It's not just better ad statistics -- with apps like Stitcher/Spotify, the app contains both discovery and download, and also the player. When you listen to podcasts on their apps, they're able to report useful, interesting metrics to podcast producers like skip rate, bounce rate, etc. They're valuable metrics.
As far as I know, podcasts that are distributed by RSS and consumed by the apple podcasts app / any other app don't gather these metrics. There's no reason they couldn't though, because RSS / Atom have plenty of flexibility to add a field for a metric reporting callback/webhook. We could have an open convention for what goes over that webhook, maybe even some competition in providing podcast playback metrics as a service.
(... does this all exist already and I'm just behind the times?)
* Is Spotify trying to "fix" that now like iTunes tried to "fix" that 20 years ago?
* Why should I "enjoy" Spotify as much as I "enjoyed" iTunes? [I didn't, not even a little bit]
Dead Comment
I have quite a few websites in my RSS Reader (I love TinyTinyRSS) and over the last 2-3 years I've seen probably ~10 sites get "makeovers" and every time, the RSS feed I was using for those sites has gone away/broken. Each time I've emailed them to ask "Oh hey are you going to bring back RSS" and of the ~4 that replied, 1 bought it back ~3 months later, the other 3 said "Nope, no one uses it" and the others didn't even reply.
So yes, it's on a steep decline I'd say. I love the "But Podcasts use it" argument! There's what, ~100 major podcast sites people use? Yes, RSS is the backend workhorse that makes it work, but the podcast(content) producers aren't using RSS, they'll be uploading their content to a website. RSS is just the backend magic that makes the podcast clients work.
RSS at most sites seems to suffer bitrot. Sometimes the RSS URL is still http when the site has moved to https etc etc.
It's sad to see the decline of it, because an RSS Reader really is a beautiful thing. But yes, RSS as a way to exposing content to people is dying and used by only a very few hardcore "oldschool" people these days I'd suggest.
Whether that meets the standard of being "alive" is probably a community judgement.
[1]: The exact number is hard to get, since a lot of feed hits are for RSS services and not all of them announce their subscriber count in their user agent.