2023 Year of the RSS Reader?

In the Nieman Lab “Predictions for Journalism 2023” project, Kelly Usher predicts that next year will be The year of the RSS Reader. As someone who has never been able to live without an RSS reader and switched over to Newsblur as soon as the writing was on the wall over at Google Reader, nothing would make me happier.

However, I agree with Joe Brockmeier over at Dissociated Press where he says

Between Twitter going to hell and the difficulty in keeping up with information, there’s opportunity. Something that unifies or improves ActivityPub and RSS and… all of the things, would be damn nice. I don’t see it on the horizon yet.

And I don’t see droves of people going back to RSS. I still use it, where it’s available, but my habits aren’t the best predictor of what others will use.”

Even the RSS reader that Ms. Usher predicts would take advantage of the opportunity she lays out does not, in fact, exist yet. If RSS were to take over in 2023 there would need to be an existing RSS reader out there with the capabilities she desires, and some kind of userbase and mindshare, even amongst super-technical geeks like me and Joe, and the fact is that such a product doesn’t exist AFAIK.