RSS never died. On the contrary, its usage for content aggregation & monitoring has been increasing over the years, specially in the business world and niche markets.
I'm speaking from my own experience running Feedity - https://feedity.com, a growing startup that helps with custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages.
I've been wondering why Feedly, which I use exclusively to follow webcomics, has been hammering me with ad copy about "the news you need to stay on the cutting edge" lately.
(RSS is, like, objectively the best way to follow multiple webcomics. I don't understand why it's not more popular.)
> (RSS is, like, objectively the best way to follow multiple webcomics. I don't understand why it's not more popular.)
The core feature of RSS is that it takes content and moves it from a site the publisher controls and into one the reader controls. This is immensely valuable to readers! It's perhaps less valuable to publishers, however.
Many publishers invest significantly in adding value to and gaining value from their websites. Advertisements, links to other sites, merchandise sales, etc. Almost all of those vanish when you feed only the core content to readers through RSS.
With all that in mind, publishers have ample reason to not invest in RSS. The economics of it are not kind to them.
If the "economic" publishers all agree to be monetized and harvested by Facebook and Google, this could be a self-correcting dynamic.
The only people left using RSS will be the classic web of independent readers and writers, who are still free to donate directly to each other with only a payment processor as middleparty.
At the same time, it's worth considering that those publishers are often much worse off when they escape the cat's malicious paws. More than one newspaper has learned this to their considerable sorrow.
I use RSS for webcomics as well as visiting the actual websites, but a few things:
1. You miss out on the aesthetics each comic's website brings to the table
2. Sometimes you miss things like "hidden panels" or blog posts you're interested in.
3. No advertisement money going towards the artists (Not a big deal if you support them by buying merch and the comics don't need a lot of bandwidth)
I would really love to develop a reader that focused on webcomics, having both a dynamically curated section as well as all of your subscribed comics. Newspaper-like layout. Customized borders around each comic to add back some of the flair each comic's website offers. Quick links to the artist's blog/website/comic permalink. Text/image-only advertisements interleaved between comics, with 100% revenue going back to artists. Even merch advertisements which occasionally appear under an artist's comic, offering links to their storefronts.
Basically an open source Funny Papers for the web, which would offer content discovery for artists through its curated/related sections, as well as revenue from advertisements. It would update daily and could be used to follow both new and old comics serially.
I just need someone to help me build it because I'm juggling too many things to devote all of my attention to it.
I don't think 1., 2., and 3. is applicable to at least how I use my RSS reader. Also, I don't understand why that is not the norm...
The way I use my RSS reader is that I scroll through the list of posts, and if it's something I wish to check back on later, I press the shortcut to send it to instapaper, and if it's something I wish to check now, I press the shortcut to open it in a new tab, and then I go on. When I'm done, all posts have been marked as read, and then I have a few tabs open that I immediately check out, and a few links in instapaper that I check out later. I never actually read an article or a comic or a video in my reader. It's terrible interface, I find. I much rather check out the actual website. I do the exact same for instapaper; open in a new tab and archive the link.
It sounds like you are using RSS as a way to generalize your access to each provider, but only as a delivery mechanism. The viewing is still done in the browser.
With the exception of web apps / extensions, it's my understanding that RSS feeds were originally meant to be consumed by a program specifically optimized for handling feeds, instead of a bloated, slow, unsafe web browser.
In the end, your RSS flow could mostly be replaced by a set of live bookmarks in your bookmark toolbar, then you wouldn't even have to leave the browser. Plus you would get easy multi-platform synchronization of your feeds. A hell of a lot easier than running an RSS reader on a private server like a lot of us.
Well, that might be the intention, but I have never experienced an "RSS Reader" that have left me with the want to actually consume the content inside it. I much prefer opening say an article in a browser and reading it with "reader mode" if it has bad text-layout.
Also, my RSS reader is just a web app, not a native application, so when I get through my list of new posts in my feeds, I'm already in the browser.
I'm speaking from my own experience running Feedity - https://feedity.com, a growing startup that helps with custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages.