I use RSS multiple times a day through Feedly and Reeder. It is anything but dead.
Sure, you can use Feedly quite easily and a lot of sites, blogs, etc. still generate RSS feeds.
On the other hand, it's not really a first-class citizen, it's not available on major services that want eyeballs, subscription fees, etc. And, frankly, a lot of us have just mostly gotten out of the habit of using it because we figure we'll learn about most interesting or important stuff on social media in some manner.
A second-citizen only internet.
A separate internet with strict open web considerations, federated protocols, rss, irc, or new updated things.
You can write web apps rather than mobile apps, publish on open source publishing platforms, use IRC, use RSS, etc. Yes, there may be discoverability and other downsides but nothing is actually preventing you from avoiding walled gardens for the most part.
There are lots of bands that have exited the mainstage of public notoriety that are still thriving in various ends.
1. It uses RSS where it's available.
2. It scrapes the content kinda like outline.com but local copies.
All data saved to your local machine, as flat files so you can use whatever backend mechanism you require.
I want to find some time this year and build this. Would anyone actually use this though?
I'd be interested in other folk's take on this.