>All RSS had to do to weather ICE, Twitter, AI, and whatever comes next

RSS did not weather Twitter. Social media is huge compared to RSS. It turned out that singular recommendation feeds are able to push URLs around better than needing every site to build in feeds themselves and then still requiring someone to turn those feeds into a singular feed for the user.

I think there are a couple of things here.

First, RSS has a bit more friction. Smashing the follow button on Twitter et al is faster than adding the feed to your RSS reader of choice unless your OS has support for default RSS app.

Second, discoverability. Just like with any distributed system vs monolithic platform, you need to find what to read yourself. For some niches this works well. If you are a software developer/hacker, you are more familiar with blogs in your area of interest. But if you have a wide range of interests you’d need to find the blogs yourself and hope their RSS feed is well formatted.

Third, the algorithm. A monolithic platform can do more to try to mix in new content based on your interests and intelligently mix up the content from sources you follow. This is of course controversial because feed algorithms can also try to cram bullshit into your feed or hide important stuff from you or create an echo chamber. But in the best case scenario they can also expose you to new sources of content you wouldn’t have found otherwise. An RSS reader would mean it is up to you to do this discovery which is more friction.

And ultimately content creators realized that they get more eyeballs on their stuff by using platforms like Facebook, Medium, Instagram, Twitter, than on blogs especially since blogs tend to be then repackaged by blog spam bots, Google’s AMP, and now LLMs.

So IMO RSS is just too manual and requires too much work. And of course since you can’t effectively advertise through it there is less incentive for creators and platforms to support it.

BlueSky and Mastodon both support RSS feeds. The loss from Google Reader dying was huge, more so than Twitter, but it’s probably balanced by the growth in Podcasts.

I don't think that market is zero-sum, so the question is not about who "won", it's whether any player lost. Despite Twitter being big, RSS is still widely used and, perhaps more importantly, widely supported and thus usable. That counts as weather in my book.

(In contrast, ICE did not weather RSS.)

I was going to say, RSS is not as big as I remember it being back in the late 2000s. I remember people having RSS clients, myself included. Now I can't remember the last time I ever used one. Where RSS is most prominent I guess is podcast feeds which were based on RSS to my understanding.

Back when Twitter was less controversial, I remember tons of techie folks gleefully saying that they didn't bother with RSS any more because Twitter was better.