You can absolutely have an RSS dependent website in 2026

Why no newsletter

A hobbyist blogger says they deliberately skipped the newsletter racket — not because they hate readers, but because they hate holding other people’s data. It has been reported that the site owner found the cost of sending thousands of emails untenable and, more pointedly, disliked the low-grade dread that comes with being the custodian of strangers’ email addresses. Think less cybersecurity textbook and more “you’ve been handed someone’s elderly cat with a medical condition” — and the sleepless nights that follow.

Traffic and the case for RSS

It has been reported that Nginx access.log data from the site shows roughly half the filtered requests hit /feed or /rss — about 50.4% RSS/feed traffic versus 3.1% homepage hits and the rest arriving from scattered links. Those logs, the blogger notes, don’t count the many requests served directly from Cloudflare’s cache, so the real totals may be higher. User-agent strings included the usual, friendly RSS readers — and one mysterious “Daily-AI-Morning,” allegedly polling with the frantic energy of someone tracking a package.

Skeptics laughed when the site owner suggested RSS could still be a primary distribution channel. “Dead,” they said. Carrier pigeon, paper atlas; the eyes rolled. Yet the numbers, however reported and imperfect, make a simple point: you can build a small, readable site in 2026 that depends on feeds and survives without turning into an email-marketing machine. Is that nostalgia, stubbornness, or a quietly effective privacy-first strategy? Maybe all three — and for many indie creators, that’s enough.

Sources: matduggan.com, Lobsters