https://book.micro.blog/rss-for-microblogs/: don’t use RSS, use Atom, which is just as widely supported outside of podcasts (where Apple has ruined it for everyone for quite unfathomable reasons, with their peculiar mixture of innovation and ossification), and is technically sound in ways that not only make it easier to generate and work with, but do actually matter here, about content types.
To be perfectly clear: the only reason anyone should use RSS in new development is podcasts.
There is some reasoning in the syndication section¹. While we may not agree with it, Manton has clearly put some thought in to Atom for this use case.
I'm personally a little unconvinced by jsonfeed too which is mentioned in later chapters, but I have to say I'd go all in on it iff it allowed us to free ourselves of RSS.
Ah, I’d skipped ahead to the RSS page and missed that. I had been perplexed that it wasn’t even mentioned, but I’m glad to see that it was addressed earlier.
I disagree with the reasoning, because Atom is every bit as widely supported outside podcasting, and RSS is more painful to generate, requiring special-purpose date formatting rather than using the standard format that your library already supports, and requiring foolish duplication (things like description versus content:encoded) to obtain almost reliable results due to some of its underspecified or unspecified areas causing genuine pain for authors and clients alike, and simply not representing the right semantics. Atom is much more dependable and harder to mess up, and the sensible choice to implement as a feed producer, except (as mentioned) in podcasting where Apple froze it out.
The nifty thing about JSON Feed for micro.blog’s purposes is that it sounds like they wanted some kind of JSON API anyway, so extending JSON Feed works out rather nicely.
For just about any other purpose, I’d say you want RSS or Atom anyway, and supporting multiple formats is actively undesirable because it complicates feed selection, so don’t even touch JSON Feed.
To be perfectly clear: the only reason anyone should use RSS in new development is podcasts.