Though of course some people really do still rely on RSS readers, stubbornly adding an RSS feed to your blog, even in 2019, is a political statement.
A fascinating dive into the history of RSS. From the initial duel-creation of RDFSS and Scripting News format, to the perceived pre-bubble-burst concept that syndication was the future, until the present competing formats and slow recession out of view, it's very neatly put together. I think there's validity in the argument that RSS was always too "geeky for mainstream use" (something I also worry about with the IndieWeb movement, no matter how much I agree with it):
Regular people never felt comfortable using RSS; it hadn’t really been designed as a consumer-facing technology and involved too many hurdles; people jumped ship as soon as something better came along.
I certainly remember thinking, in the early days of Twitter, that this was clearly the evolutionary step that RSS needed (hah!). But it's a sad thing that, as the article concludes, these "single-author" silos are much easier to evolve and adapt than consensus-driven community efforts like RSS.
