Ever since Xianguo announced the shutdown of its RSS subscription service the other day, people have been saying RSS is dead once again. And to be fair, for the average user, Xianguo was probably the RSS reader they’d encountered most. The golden age of RSS was closely tied to the boom of (independent) blogs. Now, with RSS readers shutting down or pivoting left and right, one can’t help but lament the good old days and sigh at the decline of blogging.

What is RSS exactly? According to its encyclopedia entry, “RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a specification format for content feeds.” In simple terms, it lets you view updates from subscribed websites on a single page or client. “Really Simple Syndication” is perhaps the truest expression of RSS’s purpose.

Since July 2013, when my beloved Google Reader announced its shutdown, I’ve tried Digg, Feedly, and other RSS readers that are still alive and functioning. But honestly, I’m not satisfied. They may still be alive, but they’ve lost their vitality — no updates, no innovation. From a business standpoint, the closures of Google Reader and Xianguo make perfect sense. RSS readers are expensive to operate yet offer virtually no advantage in advertising. They’re simply hard to monetize, so naturally they get shut down in due course.

But why do I say RSS is not dead? Well… look at the apps on your phone — Zaker, Toutiao, and all those other news apps. Which of them isn’t using RSS technology to crawl articles? Perhaps you no longer use a pure RSS reader, but new-form news aggregation apps and major websites still rely on this technical standard.

As long as any application or website has the need to “fetch updated content from other sites,” it’s probably using RSS. As described above, RSS hasn’t actually disappeared — it’s simply moved from the foreground to the background, quietly doing its job, appearing before you in a different guise.

Perhaps one day RSS will truly vanish in a technical sense. And when no one remembers the founding principles of the RSS protocol, that will be the moment truly worth mourning.

“It exists based on the open and equal spirit of the internet: anyone can create an RSS feed, let anyone read it, let any third-party developer use it, and let anyone who wants to read it, read it.”

Fortunately, there are still many websites and independent blogs in this world that support the RSS protocol. Last week, while chatting with Chen Yibin, deputy editor of iFanr, in a WeChat group, we agreed that there are still many excellent independent blogs both domestically and internationally that continue to publish quality content. It’s just that our channels for discovering these quality blogs have narrowed… for instance, due to the GFW shutdown.

This too is a kind of sorrow. There’s no shortage of excellent blogs in my circle that have been blocked. I won’t name names — if you know, you understand what I mean.