I’m not going to regularly read your blog if it doesn’t have RSS. Discovery happens here or on Reddit, after that it’s RSS or bust. On the plus side, I can’t remember the last blog that didn’t have a feed.
For my main blog [1], I manually update the feed.xml, on my „micro“ blog [2] I have a cron job doing it.
I like the idea of having two feeds. One blog for long form articles, and one as a microblog (that I usually call a timeline). This way, you have your own self-hosted twitter or facebook-like timeline with short posts.
With Hey Homepage, I also built-in the RSS reader. I'm following a lot of 'dev blogs' that I find here on HN. I'm now in the process of curating an automatic newsletter for myself out of all the feeds I follow (752 feeds and counting, although I should remove some).
My dream goal is to make this more interactive. I would love to be able to shoot simple messages to other websites and thank them for their content or add something to the discussion (just like happens on centralized HN here). If I for myself can get rid of Big Tech as the middle man between my website and others, I would be really happy. Right now, I use simple comment forms under my post, but I soon found out what the boundaries are for decentralized software like this. Still, I think RSS has way more potential than it is used for nowadays.
> I’m not going to regularly read your blog if it doesn’t have RSS.
This goes for news sites as well. I used to subscribe to the RSS feed of a local news site, for example. At some point they turned it off. I haven't been back to that news site.
For my main blog [1], I manually update the feed.xml, on my „micro“ blog [2] I have a cron job doing it.
[1] https://franz.hamburg
[2] https://atoms.franz.hamburg