I think what's really prevented RSS from recovering after the death of Google Reader is the cultural shift toward content farms. Most news sites have started to publish as many articles as possible to drive as much ad revenue as possible; unfortunately, most RSS platforms still treat every entry in a feed as equally important as another. IOW, if you add something like Engadget to your feed reader, be prepared to be flooded by nothing but their content.
This is what Facebook and Twitter are good at and why people are choosing it for consuming news: they recommend relevant content. If feed readers are to take off today, I think figuring out a way to promote posts from my feeds that I'd find relevant is key; this sounds like something Fever[1] was good at, although I was never interested in self-hosting it.
Sidenote: it seems like an obvious play for Facebook/Twitter to add a toggle to filter their algorithmic feeds to just news to become a hub for personalized information.
In a certain sense Google Reader killed a lot of RSS feeds and users because it was an excellent passive content distribution platform which hurts the ad revenue stream f Google. Google requires maximal active engagement of people. If people start getting stuff news etc passively why would people go to the default search engine?
This is what Facebook and Twitter are good at and why people are choosing it for consuming news: they recommend relevant content. If feed readers are to take off today, I think figuring out a way to promote posts from my feeds that I'd find relevant is key; this sounds like something Fever[1] was good at, although I was never interested in self-hosting it.
Sidenote: it seems like an obvious play for Facebook/Twitter to add a toggle to filter their algorithmic feeds to just news to become a hub for personalized information.
[1]: https://feedafever.com/