Some detractors might say that RSS is dead today, but the reality is far from it. In fact, most of the traffic to my personal website comes from RSS feeds. A little game on my website even became moderately popular after someone discovered it via my RSS feed and shared it here on HN [2].
In fact the three largest sources of traffic to my website are, in decreasing order, RSS feeds, newsletters and search engines. Reviewing the referer (sic) data in my web server logs from time to time, I was surprised to discover just how many community maintained tech newsletters exist on the Web and how active their user bases are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my silly or quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits from its followers. But I digress. Back to RSS/Atom feeds now.
So I was saying that there is indeed a decent user base around RSS feeds. I can see from the 'referer' logs that every time I publish a new note or article on my website, a good number of visitors arrive by clicking a feed entry that shows up in their feed reader. I know this with some confidence by looking at the 'referer' headers of visits to my HTML pages and the subsequent browsing of the website, as opposed to the isolated and automated fetches of the XML feeds. So there must be a reasonably active base of users around RSS feeds. It is a bit like being part of an invisible social network that we know exists and that we can measure through indirect evidence.
Many personal websites publish a blogroll with a list of their favourite bloggers. One thing I wish more blogrolls had is links to the bloggers' feeds or, even better, an OPML file that I could import into my feed reader. Then I could keep multiple collections of blogs in my feed reader, for example Alice's Blogroll, Bob's Blogroll and so on. I do publish an OPML file for my blogroll [3], and I urge other personal websites with blogrolls to do the same.
[1] https://github.com/kantord/blogtato#design-philosophy