Why not RSS?

I think the article oversimplifies a lot. Resource efficiency is just a tiny part of why RSS isn't more popular, and definitely not the main cause. It's actually a complex issue; for instance, RSS deprieves services from a way to effectively profile users.

Besides, the solution is not clarified enough. I read the linked website but there isn't a lot of details. Is it a sort of cloud service that receives push notifications for the user? The only thing I see is that it requires registration, and that can't be a good signal.

By the way, most RSS clients don't update that often. Mine does it every six hours.

While I can only speak for myself, I kindly disagree with the reasoning.

The main reason that made me stop using RSS/Atom in my private life was that most sites stopped providing full feeds and instead opted for only showing the headlines or headlines with a short snippet. Even those sites without any ads started doing that for some reason. If I have to use a browser to read the articles anyway I might as well simply check once a day my usual sites, because that will just work for the foreseeable future in contrast to any RSS/Atom alternative which is doomed to have the same fate.

The main reason that made me stop using RSS/Atom in my professional life was compliance and the only available RSS reader being Microsoft Outlook which is IMHO an awful RSS reader. Also I had ever so often a clash with our internal IT-Department because they assumed my frequent pulling of some job-related feeds were due to a computer virus and it just became a hassle to convince them again (and again) that it was not. So instead I made a daily reminder with a time slot of 15min to look manually at the few job related sites and use mostly the link-highlighting of the browser to identify if I already read something.

To sum it all up. As soon as RSS/Atom did not work anymore for me I opted to adapt in a way that would not force me to adapt again. Given that any 3rd party service is bound to be broken at some point I'd rather accept my fate than fighting the inevitable.

The numbers there are bogus. In reality your client isn't setup to ping remote sites every 15 minutes. Instead it'll learn and only ping once per day or so (or if you force a refresh).

Whats more if you use a SaaS based service then it'll only refresh each site once for the dozens to thousands of customers who subscribe.

> Allowing a service to notify is the same as open the door to the hell of spam. Basically, we loose the control on what we want to receive

That doesn't make sense. You have no control over what's in the feed, the feed owner does

I always want to upvote RSS discussions, but damn this is a bad article. The numbers are wrong (feed fetches can be deduplicated and 15min is a silly number), the arguments are wrong (Firefox had a local RSS client, how could it waste server resources), the pretense that Facebook is the web (might have made sense 10 years ago). The ramble about push being disorganized, I can't parse at all.

Then it hits us with an ad for what seems to be an RSS client SaaS (a real one, not the strawman they critiqued). Wtf?

RSS is head over heels. In an ideal world, websites would connect to users wanting the information and then a notification server installed on their devices would listen for incoming connection and display the wanted notifications. No tradeoff between latency and wasted bandwidth. Sadly the Internet isn't a peer-to-peer network anymore and dynamic IP, NAT and firewalls make this impossible.

Why not XMPP PubSub instead of a proprietary solution?