>That little tangerine bubble has become a wistful symbol of defiance against a centralized web increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations, ...
Just a quibble about terminology. Those handful of corporations do not control the web; they merely dominate it. It's an important distinction. Actual control is censorship, which is an important issue these days. The fact that a lot of people are using systems associated with a few companies is in the end relatively unimportant.
RSS is quite important simply because it is used to discover individual articles from lots of different sources. People who post things with RSS feeds are not raging against the dark but instead are routinely maintaining the light.
Just a quibble about terminology. Those handful of corporations do not control the web; they merely dominate it. It's an important distinction. Actual control is censorship, which is an important issue these days. The fact that a lot of people are using systems associated with a few companies is in the end relatively unimportant.
RSS is quite important simply because it is used to discover individual articles from lots of different sources. People who post things with RSS feeds are not raging against the dark but instead are routinely maintaining the light.