“We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

Well, that's the whole point - RSS lets you circumvent all (or most of) the mechanisms that Facebook, Google, Medium etc. etc. have implemented to monetize content. So they are directly interested in killing it off sooner rather than later. And if the big players don't support it, the people/organizations/whatever who still maintain their own blog/news site are also more likely to see it as obsolete (or have web devs who tend to follow the "new shiny" and will advise them that RSS is obsolete).

> - lots of posts include iframes, or content that only makes sense with JS enabled

These are the fault of broken RSS feed generators. The RSS feed should contain a textual summary of the article.

> - if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page

This is working as intended and not an issue. I don't think any alternatives would make sense.

> - there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety of your archive in every feed response.

Agree that this sucks.

> - XML

Really?

All things you are trying to get others to use have a brand, whether implicit or not. Heck, it's usually even valued separately from the technology (good will, etc).

RSS, the spec may be fine. I've implemented RSS readers, heck, i use newsblur every day still.

RSS, the brand, is a goner.

The OP (and twitter post) is complaining that others consider the brand dead, and are arguing that the use case it covers are unmet by other things, and that the spec is still good stuff. Those are all very orthogonal things.

It's great that the spec is still the right thing! But the brand is dead, so you won't get anywhere without fixing that.

This would be good, but it seems most people are too focused on RSS and not much on the actual usage. The point of RSS is to receive changes in a structured way. RSS is just a tool for this. But there are also other ways and other tools for this.

> It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds.

No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a minority-feature. The mass of user used to be bigger, but not to the level where it could be called a mass medium.

We don't need to communicate better to the publisher to force our will onto them. Instead, we should find ways to ease their work and help them satisfy our demands. For example, there was a movement for embedding semantic and structural data right into a document. Something came out of this, but maybe we should light up that flame again and move it more into a direction where it could be used for our feedreaders. Or just adapt the feedreader to better support the already existing structures?

This could easily sold with support for accessibility, and everyone would win here. Thinking about, how is the state of accessibility-technologies today? Could it be used for easy and reliable parsing?