> This ... is actually more elegant and useful than RSS in numerous regards, at least for my workflows. (Though a flipside view might be that Mastodon / the Fediverse is more addictive and a greater timesuck).
I mostly agree with you on this. In fact, this concept somewhat came from a fediverse/activity_pub thing I was working on awhile ago: https://github.com/pubcast/pubcast
The concept of having an "inbox" and "outbox" and then just interlacing with everyone else really hits that part of my brain.
What I discovered about PeerTube recently, as a Mastodon user, is that PeerTube feeds can be subscribed to / followed as any other Mastodon user. Possibly even aggregated instances (I'm still sorting out how this operates).
This ... is actually more elegant and useful than RSS in numerous regards, at least for my workflows. (Though a flipside view might be that Mastodon / the Fediverse is more addictive and a greater timesuck).
But the ability to be notified of new content from within what's a primary social channel is pretty compelling. My RSS reader(s) by contrast seem to be higher-friction / higher-frustration (there are many, many, many poorly-structured or poorly-utilised feeds, I should of course weed those out, that ... seems like more work than it's worth).
The problem that direct access is seen as remunerative (that is: hitting a website directly), whilst various syndication channels are seen as appropriating value from the sites is also problematic. It's endemic to both advertising and surveillance-capitalism based monetisation, and is yet another case of how such practices when widely adopted actively destroy useful tools and platforms.