@strypey @liaizon @natriumchloride @jeffmcneill rss declined for numerous reasons but here's the big ones:

1. general developer antipathy toward xml
2. unlike permissive html, rss was strict and developers constantly fucked up implementing it correctly, a single minor error made the entire feed unusable (tying back to 1, maybe the xml hate was justified)
3. end users wanted to be fed the entire document through rss and read it on their reader of choice rather than ujst get a link through syndication, but this stripped tracking and ad embeds so content producers weren't enthusiastic
4. clients tended to be poor, everybody remembers the couple good paid ones that were essentially aggregator services in reality
5 . mozilla of course, ignoring their mission statement massively contributed to the death spiral by removing direct rss support from the browser

so now we live in a world where regular webpages that are literally just status feeds don't even have rss on them so you have to scrape and dom interpret the fucking things; and people beg them to post updates "via mastodon" which they inevitably do by joining a massive server that silently blocks half the fediverse from being able to subscribe to it. what a fucking mess