Not to disagree with your post, but I'd *love* to support a renaissance of RSS. It was/is essentially peak distribution of content in a proper decentralized manner, putting users first and letting providers use whatever they want freely to generate it. No walled gardens. No restrictions.

And no good tools. RSS readers in 2024 still keep failing with the same failing interfaces that failed in 1999.

No, I don't want a portal with a little box for every feed I follow.

No, I don't want a listing like an email client.

No, I never want it to show me a piece of content twice unless I ask for it. (e.g. as David Byrne says: "say something once, why say it again?")

Yes, I expect to subscribe to more RSS feeds than I can read entirely so I expect it to learn my preferences like my YOShInOn agent does. In a cycle of a few days, YOShInOn might find 3000 or so articles in RSS feeds and it chooses 300 to show me which I thumbs up or thumbs down. I knew such a thing was possible when I wrote this paper

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC387301/

but now it is not only possible but easy.

Podcasts are RSS. I don't think it's dead at all there.

Except when they're on soundcloud, or spotify, or audible, etc...

I have friends who share links to podcasts on Spotify, and I can always get them as RSS in my podcast app.

Maybe it exists, but I have not encountered a situation where I could not access a podcast with RSS.