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From RSS to Atom (susam.net)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/webdev@programming.dev
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Contrary to the recurring claim that RSS and Atom are dead, most of the traffic to my personal website still comes from web feeds, even in 2026. Every time I publish a new post, I can see a good number of visitors arriving from feed readers. From the referrer data in my web server logs (which is not completely reliable but still offers some insight), the three largest sources of traffic to my website are web feeds, newsletters and search engines, in that order.

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[–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

Why did they switch?

If they already have RSS and see traffic from it, I'm surprised they replace instead of introducing an alternative.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    It wasn't a switch per se. The same people that used to get the RSS feeds continue to get them, but as atom.

    All subscribers may see more content for this feed in their reader, but they won't have to change anything on their end, in order to continue getting the feed.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Unfortunately, IIRC, some feed readers only support RSS, not Atom. Those users may see some warning like "invalid format".

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    Are RSS and Atom not supposed to be interchangeable?

    Tbh, i never really paid attention which one i was subscribing to, it always worked.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    They are totally different format: different structure, different keyword, different time date format, different escape way, different language specifying way...
    Their common parts are only both used for feed and both use XML.
    And even more, interoperability of RSS 2.0 itself is horrible, RSS 2.0 standard left too many details in not specified situation, such as how to deal with relative URL...
    For more infomation, you can read https://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    The RSS 2.0 specification is copyrighted by Harvard University and is frozen. No significant changes can be made (although the specification is under a Creative Commons licence) and it is intended that future work be done under a different name; Atom is one example of such work.

    i had it completely wrong the whole time, i actually thought Atom was kind of a fork from the frozen RSS 2.0. That it had the same structure, just with more fields - to put it simply, RSS 2.0 with more features.

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