Conspiracy theory (that I genuinely believe): Consumers don't know what they want, and in reality they would love RSS if it was allowed to blossom. But, RSS readers make the web unmonetizable, so they've been actively destroyed from every angle, in favor of the enshittified feeds the world is now addicted to. There are so many ways to quietly bury a certain technology if the market incentives are stong enough. You can't algorithmically manipulate and addict someone who just follows accounts chronologically without ads. So silicon valley market forces tend to discourage RSS. Google killed their RSS reader once they realized browser-based feed browsing generated way more adsense profits. Other readers get VC investment and mysteriously their free version becomes unusable garbage and adoption plateaus. Not every controlling interest in a VCs portfolio is benevolent. Facebook, twitter, etc all make it against their terms of service to "scrape" your own friends privately shared posts - you can only see them via the walled garden of ads. Apples app store fees would drop if consumers understood the utopia an RSS based web has the potential of being, instead of a dozen addictive apps. But it was too free. RSS derails trillion dollar roadmaps. The incentives are clear, and silicon valley knows it.