Reddit Sets Dates to Retire RSS Feeds and Close Public API Access

Reddit will stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026, and close its remaining public API access in phases running through March 2027, the company announced on September 30, 2026, pairing the shutdown timeline with a $1 million migration program for app developers and citing large-scale scraping and automated abuse as the reasons.

The changes were detailed in an announcement in Reddit’s r/modnews community and a companion technical post in r/redditdev, with dates, migration instructions, and next steps for moderators and developers whose workflows depend on the retiring systems.

RSS Support Ends November 13

Reddit said it is retiring RSS because the feed has become a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse. It told moderators who rely on RSS-based alerts to review their setups and migrate their workflows before the November 13, 2026 cutoff so their alerts are not interrupted.

For common moderation alerts, Reddit recommends Devvit apps such as Discord Relay, which relays subreddit posts, comments, modqueue items, modmail messages, modlog actions, and reported content to Discord or Slack channels through webhook destinations. The app supports up to six destinations, added Slack support in its version 3.0.0 update, and was last updated on August 31, 2026, according to its official app page. A Reddit Help Center guide confirms the shutdown date and walks moderators through setting up mod queue alerts, estimating roughly 15 to 20 minutes of setup with no coding experience required.

For anyone using RSS outside a community they moderate, Reddit said there is no replacement. “RSS has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time, and we’re grateful to everyone who used it to stay connected to Reddit,” the announcement stated.

Phased API Shutdown and the App Migration Program

The companion r/redditdev post lays out the timeline for moving public Data API apps and bots to Reddit’s Developer Platform. New requests for public API access will no longer be accepted after October 31, 2026. Reddit plans to share a migration progress update and deadline reminder on November 10, 2026, and registration for the migration bounty program closes on November 30, 2026.

Starting January 12, 2027, Reddit will begin removing API access for apps and users that have not registered or responded to its outreach, and app maintainers are told to register before that date to avoid disruption. A further progress update is scheduled for February 23, 2027, and public access will close for all remaining apps and users in March 2027.

Reddit said more than 14,000 apps and bots have registered, and it described the migrations of DeltaBot, MagicEyeBot, and RemindMeBot as completed or near-complete. To encourage the rest, the company’s $1 million App Migration Program offers $1,000 payments for eligible apps that successfully migrate, eligibility for Reddit Developer Funds, free hosting, migration guides, office hours, and direct support. The official app registration portal documents the porting bounty, Developer Funds eligibility, and free hosting for migrating apps. Moderators whose communities depend on an app or bot with an unknown maintainer can flag it through a form, which Reddit said has received more than 100 submissions.

Automod and Old Reddit Restrictions

The r/modnews post also disables Automoderator’s enforcement capabilities — Report, Filter, Remove, Mark as spam, and Approve — for newly created communities and communities that have never used automod, making Rules Hub and Automations the default path for rules enforcement in those communities. Automod’s non-enforcement capabilities remain available and unchanged, and communities already using automod see no change. In the announcement’s comments, the Reddit administrator who authored the post confirmed the change is in effect as of September 30, 2026, and said filtering is a known gap the company plans to address over the coming months.

On Old Reddit, the legacy desktop web experience, Reddit said that in the next few months it will limit logged-in access to accounts that have used Old Reddit within the last six months, a requirement the company said covers the vast majority of Old Reddit users. Logged-in moderators are exempt. Reddit required users to log in to Old Reddit earlier in 2026 and framed both steps as measures against abusive scraping and automated traffic.

The September 30, 2026 announcement executes plans Reddit first shared in an August 5, 2026 company post, which said Rules Hub had been in early testing with moderators from more than 700 communities, described its LLM-based evaluation of rule intent as an alternative to Automod’s keyword and pattern matching, and said Reddit would gradually restrict public API access while transitioning third-party apps to the Developer Platform.