Comment by foxfired
I don't know about being back, but it certainly isn't dead. A few years back, I used to get at least 10k readers a day. That number went down to less than 100 a day at it's lowest, I was writing 10 entries a year at most. Last year, I wrote just 4.
One thing I failed to notice was that RSS was still active. So this year, I started consistently contributing, over 150 so far, and I see RSS picking up right where it left off [0]. A lot of my blog post suck, but I write them as an observation and my current understanding of a subject. Readers have agency to skip what they don't like and only read what they like.
I hadn't looked at my feed subscriber stats in a while, turns out I had around 6,000 at the start of 2025 and I'm up to around 12,000 now - very healthy!
I use my own server-side tracking to count them - I look out for the user-agent from feed software like Feedly and pull the number out of it:
Here's my code for that: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/blob/main/feedst...