And so heavily truncated, spoiling the point in many (but not all) cases of having an RSS feed entirely.
I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, as a reader it's convenient to have the full text and images of the articles/posts so that I can look at them all in one place without much effort.
On the other hand, as a webmaster, I might have months or years worth of content on my site that I want visitors to look at, and if they never visit my site again after finding and subscribing to the RSS feed, odds are that they'll never see any of it. So truncating the entries is a good way to nudge readers into visiting my site if there's something that looks interesting rather than downloading full text and images for a bunch of articles that they might not even read, which would be a waste of bandwidth.
https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/
NNW is fast and simple. Using it, I've come to feel that RSS doesn't need to be updated -- it just needs modernised tooling and a frictionless UX. Now I have a good reader, I spend as much time reading feeds as I do on social media. And I feel good about spending time reading and skimming, knowing that there isn't an engagement algorithm which is trying to steer me towards extreme responses.
Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
Chrome - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-finder/ijdgeed...
The fact someone took the time to understand why they should care about Google Reader, set it up, and regularly used it does require some technical interest/ability. That's why most internet users didn't know what RSS was even at the peak of the blogging and RSS revolution circa 2005, whereas today (or even back then), everyone intuitively understands newsletters.
I'm not saying they're better for everyone, frankly they are far worse for regular readers in my view, but they're the clearest successor.
I personally think RSS was killed when social networks shifted to social media...
It is possible for software to be finished and only require minimal maintenance.
RSS.
What I can't figure out is why there's a persistent myth that RSS has somehow vanished from the internet...
RSS readers were useful because you had all the news/posts in one place (instead of many browser tabs/newsletters/social accounts). You read, curated and shared from the same place, and you were able to easily choose what categories you wanted to read and when.
Other commenters in here have mentioned their readers of choice; I can add mine: NewsBlur.
Turns out RSS is still in pretty common use, as far as I can tell, unless you can point to a handful of sites that aren't using either RSS or Atom.
Invariably, when the topic of RSS comes up, someone laments its "passing", which leads me to ask (again): where is this impression coming from? Is it the mere absence of Google Reader?
Is there a social aspect I never knew about?
I see you mentioned other tools being lacking, but I know NewsBlur, at least, provides all those capabilities. (Not sure about "curating", though; maybe you could define that a bit more? There is the "blurblog", which has its very own RSS feed, which lets you surface articles you like, and there's the "save" function.)
I still subscribe to feeds in a different tool but it's not the same.
Also, "not the same"... can you be more specific? (And which tool?)
Inoreader is the only RSS reader I'm comfortable with, Thunderbird's also ok. They aren't "widget" pages though.
Interesting to think that an attack vector against an open standard is creating the objectively best implementation and then shutting down after killing competition and consolidation.