Back in the late 90s when the portal wars were going strong, it seemed apparent that syndication was going to be the future of the web and RSS was going to be key. It didn’t work out that way. Sinclair Target writes about the rise and fall of RSS on Motherboard:

Regular people never felt comfortable using RSS; it hadn’t really been designed as a consumer-facing technology and involved too many hurdles; people jumped ship as soon as something better came along.

That something, for better or worse, was Twitter and Facebook. Their advantage: ease of use for the end user. As we try to imagine a stronger independent web again, we need to keep that in mind.