The conventional narrative of RSS is that it died when Google killed Google Reader in 2013. This narrative is wrong in an interesting way. RSS didn't die — its casual users left for social media, but its dedicated users stayed, and those users were disproportionately the people who produced and curated information professionally. The RSS ecosystem that remained after 2013 was smaller but higher-quality.
What happened next was quieter than the death narrative. A set of new RSS readers emerged — Feedly initially, then Inoreader, then a wave of smaller, more opinionated tools. These clients were built with the lessons of the Google Reader era applied: better mobile interfaces, smarter filtering, integration with read-later tools. They also added features Reader never had.
What "good again" actually means
The most significant change in contemporary RSS is the quality of the content. The shift to social media distribution over the past decade has created a counterreaction: people who value long-form, considered writing have actively sought out direct subscriptions and RSS feeds as an alternative to algorithmic curation. The result is that RSS feeds today, in aggregate, represent a higher proportion of writing worth reading than they did in 2010.
The newsletter boom of the early 2020s contributed to this. Most newsletter platforms publish RSS feeds alongside their email editions. This means you can follow newsletter writers without giving up your email address, which a certain subset of internet users considers a significant quality-of-life improvement.
The current landscape
The tools worth knowing about are Feedbin, which is simple and well-made; NetNewsWire, which is free, open-source, and specifically for Apple platforms; and FreshRSS, which is self-hostable if you prefer to keep your reading data off third-party servers. The read-later integration with Omnivore and Readwise has made RSS a practical part of a larger information workflow rather than a standalone reading environment.
None of this is new. But if you stopped using RSS in 2013 and haven't looked back, the current tools are worth checking again.