To be honest, I am still missing the point of the article. Let's compare emails and RSS: both are protocols, and both depend on the additional tools to make them more use-friendly (at least, I doubt if anybody reads raw RSS feeds). The similarity also doesn’t end here: both are regularly announced as dead and antiquated, but both somehow still stand strong.

> What is dead, or at least like Arthur, waiting for the right moment to come back is the idea of RSS as a system for connecting content streams together and building higher order services on top.

The closest to it is the situation with the podcast ecosystem, which if I recall correctly depends heavily on RSS feeds to propagate podcasts’ playlists.

> When too much thought & conversation is captured inside Facebook, Twitter, Slack and all these other services who depend upon owning you & your content, the RSS system cannot thrive.

I agree that information capture by various social media is quite troubling. I am currently worried the most about all development-related discussion in many minor projects and communities (not only programming-related) switching over to Discord, of all things.

Despite this, I disagree with the assessment that it is a major bottleneck for the RSS ecosystem. I have never used Google Reader, so I don’t have any kind of before and after perspective, but in my humble opinion RSS is a standard that is in quite a good condition overall. Despite social medias’ walled garden approach and greater focus on instant messaging than blogging, I rarely stumble upon a website with content of episodic nature without any kind of RSS feed. The only significant exceptions are YouTube and Twitter.

> I saw amazing possibilities arising out of individuals publishing their content, […], and layering of services. That future didn't happen.

The thing you describe reminds me more of something akin to Mastodon and ActivityPub (albeit I never used any platform depending on it). From what I remember about ActivityPub was that it was designed from ground-up as both a protocol and an extendable system to plug into as a clear alternative to walled-garden design. From what I gather, RSS was never meant to be that.

How such a system based on RSS only would even look like?

> […] increasing use of micro-formats to add semantic information, […]

Isn’t it basically what JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa do? With a bonus of not being tied to any walled garden (that I am aware of). Though I suppose having a way to use them in a more automatic way would be nice.