Yet it survives to this day because of one reason - it's dead simple to serve and consume it. Chrome may need an extension to handle it properly (I use one on Firefox).

The singular challenge it faces is discoverability, as you point out. The above mentioned extension solves that for me. But if it were to be brought back as a default feature on browsers, RSS would be an instant hit again. There's always the opportunity to resurrect it.

You must be using different social media than me because it is all pushing celebrities and ads not friends and family that I want to see.

I much prefer being in control of my feed. In an ideal world there would probably be a mix of both (I have a list of people who I see every post and a list where I see popular or major items) but between the current options I far prefer something straightforward. Especially when the algorithm isn't fully tuned to optimize my interests.

The only ways I use social media would be better served by RSS. I follow specific businesses, organizations, and people, and want to see everything they post, in chronological order. I do my best to achieve this with social media, but RSS would be better.

For news: per-topic or per-region feeds would probably help. I think AP used to have those, maybe still does.

RSS feeds can drown you in quality content you're not interested in 75% of the time. Social Media can drown you in content that seems interesting, but is worthless 75% of the time. But that's my experience - yours could be different (I totally made up the numbers, but you get the idea).

Depending on your feed reader you can filter stuff pretty well with custom rules. I use newsboat. Even without hard filtering, thanks to the compact density I can sift through a huge number of articles in barely any time at all. Yes, I am doing it myself, the horror of laboring, but again it takes barely any time at all to go through the days RSS feeds even with a few news sites throwing 100 articles a day. Mark as read. Done.

On the contrary, IME social media sites seem to fight me on filtering what I get to see. They are happy to show me what they want me to see, but constantly thwart my attempts to decide for myself. How many plugins should I need to install to get FB or twitter to respect my choice to show the timeline chronologically.

In theory a market could arise around providing bespoke algorithmic feeds for one's RSS content, in some kind of adapter model, but I don't know enough about ML engineering to suggest whether that is at all economically feasible. Maybe?

An RSS client could do that, no?

Are you talking about something that can go out to any web site, grab the HTML, and turn it into a feed that's consistent with any other feed and not a big hairy mess of stuff that wasn't actually part of the content?

That doesn't sound trivial at all to me, so maybe I'm misunderstanding.

RSS is not an API, though. It's another content type like HTML, typically XML, but in a specific format that makes it easier for programs to consume.

Generating it is trivial in most web frameworks and CMSs, and sites that don't offer it either never bothered to set it up, or actively choose not to. This is hardly a fault of RSS itself.

What you suggest as a successor is a workaround for such sites, not something that should be the norm.

Agree! Just wrote basically this comment before I saw yours. Disappointingly even pay tools like Feedly have extremely poor RSS creators. All Feedly's features for the past few years seem to focus on some obscure niche of IT security threat awareness.