- Of the 1,000 websites that Feeder users follow most, 942 publish an RSS feed of their own that works, according to Feeder's data from October 11, 2026.
- Of the 10,306 RSS feeds that 10 or more Feeder users follow, 71.4% published a new post in the 30 days before October 11, 2026, and 9.5% were broken, according to Feeder's data.
- Feedly is the RSS reader that people most often leave for Feeder: in the 12 months to September 30, 2026, 306 people moved to Feeder with a Feedly export, according to Feeder's data.
This is the first edition of Feeder's State of RSS. It covers July to September 2026: the feeds people follow in Feeder, the readers they come from, and what changed in the wider world of RSS.
Every quarter, Feeder counts what happens to the feeds its users follow. The numbers come from Feeder's own data, so no survey and no guesswork. How we count explains the rules, and you can download the data as CSV.
Do the most-followed websites still have RSS?
Yes. Of the 1,000 websites that Feeder users follow most, 942 publish an RSS feed of their own that works.
| Website | Sites | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Own feed, with a post in the last 30 days | 822 | 82.2% |
| Own feed works, but no post in 30 days | 120 | 12% |
| Own feed is broken | 51 | 5.1% |
| No feed of their own | 7 | 0.7% |
For the longer story of who still publishes feeds and why, read our article on who still uses RSS.
Feeds that broke or went quiet in July to September 2026
These are the most-followed websites, with 100 or more followers, where Feeder stopped getting new posts. A feed counts as broken after a week of failed checks, and as quiet when it is silent for 30 days and much longer than it usually is.
| Website | Feed | What changed | Followers |
|---|---|---|---|
| css-tricks.com | CSS-Tricks | No new post since August 31, 2026 | 409 |
| support.microsoft.com | Microsoft Support - Windows 10 | Broken since August 5, 2026 | 145 |
| who.int | News (English) - World Health Organization | No new post since July 31, 2026 | 103 |
How healthy are the feeds people follow?
Feeder checks every feed around the clock. Of the 10,306 feeds that 10 or more Feeder users follow, this is how they looked on October 11, 2026.
| Feed status | Feeds | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Posted in the last 30 days | 7,360 | 71.4% |
| No new post for 30 to 90 days | 519 | 5% |
| No new post for 90 days or more | 1,428 | 13.9% |
| Failing to load | 25 | 0.2% |
| Broken | 974 | 9.5% |
How often feeds post, by topic
A typical news feed posts many times a day, while a webcomic shows up about once a week. These are the medians for the feeds on each Discover topic, with the topic's most-followed feed and the one that grew fastest in July to September 2026.
| Topic | Posts a week | Share posting daily | Most followed | Fastest growing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| News | 129.1 | 89.7% | BBC News - Home | The Electronic Intifada (+18.9%) |
| Sports | 77.8 | 77.3% | www.espn.com - TOP | The Athletic (+25.9%) |
| Entertainment | 19.5 | 62.1% | TMZ.com | London Review of Books (+17.7%) |
| Gaming | 14.0 | 59.5% | Kotaku | Game Developer (+12.4%) |
| Design | 6.8 | 48.4% | Design Milk | Architectural Digest (+10.6%) |
| Business | 6.5 | 49.3% | Bloomberg | Bloomberg Markets (+12.8%) |
| Startups | 6.4 | 46.7% | Crunchbase News | Crunchbase News (+7.1%) |
| Science | 6.2 | 46.5% | xkcd.com | NASA (+14.2%) |
| Tech | 4.8 | 42.3% | TechCrunch | AI | TechCrunch (+111.6%) |
| Marketing | 2.8 | 37.2% | Search Engine Journal | Later Social Media Marketing Feed (+4.5%) |
| Food | 2.2 | 29.2% | Bon Appétit | Bon Appétit (+2.7%) |
| Comics | 1.0 | 7.3% | The Oatmeal | Out-of-Placers (+3.3%) |
Looking for feeds to follow? Best RSS feeds: the 100 most popular RSS feeds to follow and RSS directory: 10 RSS feed directories that still work are good places to start.
Which RSS readers do people leave?
Most people who move to Feeder bring their feeds in an OPML file, and many of those files carry the name of the reader they came from. Of 5,432 people who imported a file in the 12 months to September 30, 2026, these came from a reader we can name.
| Reader they left | People, 12 months | Feeds they brought, on average | People, July to September 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feedly | 306 | 124 | 68 |
| Inoreader | 214 | 186 | 46 |
| Feedbro | 213 | 313 | 70 |
| NetNewsWire | 44 | 53 | 12 |
| Follow | 40 | 100 | 2 |
| Feeeed | 29 | 36 | 5 |
| Vivaldi | 21 | 65 | 5 |
| Fluent Reader | 19 | 120 | 4 |
| NewsBlur | 19 | 111 | 5 |
| Reeder | 13 | 51 | 1 |
Comparing readers? Best RSS readers in 2026, compared lays out prices and limits side by side.
Where new follows come from
RSS is not only blogs and news sites. Of the 23,340 people who followed something new in Feeder in July to September 2026, this is the share who added each kind of feed. One person can add many kinds.
Reddit plans to end its RSS feeds on November 13, 2026. Reddit feeds are part of these numbers, so the next edition will show what that change means for the people who follow them.
| Kind of feed | People | Share of people |
|---|---|---|
| Any other RSS or Atom feed | 20,982 | 89.9% |
| Feeder feed for a site without RSS | 3,829 | 16.4% |
| Google News search | 1,611 | 6.9% |
| YouTube | 1,189 | 5.1% |
| A newsletter sent to Feeder | 1,068 | 4.6% |
| 1,054 | 4.5% | |
| Google Alerts | 519 | 2.2% |
| Substack | 383 | 1.6% |
| Google News topic | 115 | 0.5% |
| Bluesky | 63 | 0.3% |
| Mastodon | 41 | 0.2% |
Feed formats and features
We fetched the main feed of each of the most-followed websites once and checked what it sends.
Formats are shares of the 830 feeds whose format the validator could identify.
| Format | Feeds | Share |
|---|---|---|
| RSS 2.0 | 715 | 86.1% |
| Atom | 85 | 10.2% |
| RSS 1.0 (RDF) | 30 | 3.6% |
| JSON Feed | 0 | 0% |
| Feature | Feeds | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Served over HTTPS | 858 of 911 | 94.2% |
| Valid feed, with no errors | 774 of 911 | 85% |
| Lets readers skip unchanged downloads (ETag or Last-Modified) | 609 of 911 | 66.8% |
| Announces a WebSub hub for instant updates | 28 of 911 | 3.1% |
| Sends the full text of each post | 299 of 855 | 35% |
Around RSS
What happened outside Feeder. Each number names where it comes from.
| Quarter | GitHub projects | Show HN posts |
|---|---|---|
| Q4 2025 | 58 | 13 |
| Q1 2026 | 115 | 37 |
| Q2 2026 | 131 | 15 |
| Q3 2026 | 197 | 17 |
GitHub projects are new public repositories tagged rss-reader (GitHub search API). Show HN posts are Hacker News launch posts with RSS in the title (Hacker News search API).
The English Wikipedia article on RSS had 31,779 views a month in July to September 2026, against 33,130 a year earlier (Wikimedia pageviews).
News from July to September 2026
- Reddit announced that it will end its RSS feeds on November 13, 2026. It said RSS had become a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse. techcrunch.com
- Inoreader added mentions, which tag the companies, people, places and products in articles, along with a new search. inoreader.com
- Unread 5.0 for iPhone, iPad and Mac added FreshRSS and Miniflux accounts. People who host their own reader can now add and organize feeds from Unread, where before it could only sync what they read. goldenhillsoftware.com
- FreshRSS 1.30.0 now blocks feeds on local networks by default, a security fix that some self-hosters need to plan for. github.com
- Liferea 2.0, the long-running Linux reader, shipped with a new design and sync for subscriptions over WebDAV. github.com
How we count
- The numbers come from Feeder's database on October 11, 2026. Changes over time, such as new follows and feeds that broke, cover July to September 2026.
- We report totals only. The page never names a person, and never names or counts a private feed in the feed tables.
- A feed counts in the feed tables when 10 or more people who actively use Feeder follow it, and when Discover would list it. That leaves out private feeds, personal URLs with a key in them, adult and pirated content, and personal Google Alerts. New follows count every kind of feed, Google Alerts included.
- A feed followed under several addresses, such as http and https, counts once.
- A website is the host of the site a feed links to. Platforms where every feed is a different channel, such as YouTube, Reddit and Medium, are not websites here.
- A website's own feed is one the publisher runs. Feeds that Feeder builds for sites without RSS, and feeds from scraping services, do not count as the site's own.
- Healthy means the last check loaded the feed. The date of a post is when Feeder stored it.
- Posts a week is the average over the last 12 weeks, for up to 500 of the most-followed feeds on each Discover topic.
- Growth compares followers at the start and end of July to September 2026, for feeds with at least 100 followers at the start. Here a follower is anyone who follows the feed, active or not.
- Readers people leave counts only OPML files whose name shows the reader, such as feedly.opml, so the real numbers are higher.
- New follows count the follows people made in July to September 2026 and still kept on October 11, 2026.
- Formats and features come from one fetch of each feed with Feeder's RSS feed validator.
Feeder is an RSS reader, so we have a stake in RSS doing well. That is why the rules above are fixed before we count, and why the data is here to download. Please cite "Feeder's State of RSS" and link to this page.