this is what Reader was and has always made me even more confused as to why Google killed it off. They had the right start for a unique take on content focused/small group discussion based social networking and the tossed it for “circles”

Google itself is part of Big Tech Social Control. They're not willing to engage in services where they're not ultimately in control, like RSS. They suffered in the short term, but if you've struggled to find the RSS feed for a website or a podcast lately, that's exactly what they were trying to achieve.

Google has given up on RSS completely. They are still supporting https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/ and bringing back a variation of rss reader https://in.pcmag.com/browsers/145379/google-follow-rss-reade.... “Follow the web” is the new theme.

and so did facebook (=> remember friendfeed).

That's not social network because there's no interaction between entities and most people wouldn't set up a blog.

> most people wouldn't set up a blog

well, that's the unspoken fallacy: becoming active is cumbersome.

But that doesn't have to be, it could be as easy as renting a domain and copying a single file. (Plug: https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo)

But if taking a breath is too much of an effort, one may well remain unheard.

Twitter obviously hates it too.