I don't like RSS much. Most of the time RSS shows me the title and sometime it can show me the body too. But I want more: I want a unified interface for the content and the comments. I wish to have a protocol/app that can fetch body and N level deep comments and show me a Firefox Reader Mode like interface.
That's how RSS evolved into social. Let comments resurface with the salmon protocol, give some formatting with microformats, ... It's functional, but there's nothing that implements the whole stack. If you want more info on where it is today, check out https://indieweb.org/
Today this has all been superseded by ActivityPub, rethinking things from the ground up and including everything.
They have an OSS version you can host yourself. It fixes the problem of sites not sharing their full text in their feed, by going and scraping the site into a full feed for you.
That’s very cool. I’d also recommend RSS-Bridge, which is another OSS self-hosted tool that generates RSS feeds. It might be useful if you’re looking for RSS feeds for non-article oriented sites: there’s a wide array of scrapers built in (Amazon price changes, Apple App Store updates, etc.) and it’s not too hard to add your own if you don’t mind PHP.
