Atom is better than RSS in the way Betamax was better than VHS. With the same outcome and consequences for practical use.
Try putting a Betamax tape into a VHS VCR and see if you can watch it.
This is like pointing at the monitor of a desktop computer and saying, "that's the computer". It is effective to communicate with people who aren't interested in computers, but it's also not true and the distinction does have important consequences for behavior. Atom is not RSS even if some feed readers support both and most people don't know what feeds are.
And because of that, and the early popularity and widespread adoption of RSS, the better format (atom) isn't used nearly as much. And calls to increase use of betamax/atom generally went and go unheeded.
That may have been true 20 years ago, but now that pretty much no-one uses either of them , I'd be surprised if RSS was still meaningfully more widespread than Atom. (Except everything is being called RSS).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49141336 is the only valid response to your VHS/Betamax comparison, really.
Do you use “RSS” as a protol specifically, or do you use “RSS” as in “any feed no matter the protocol”?
> pretty much no-one uses either of them
I don't know why they persist in still doing that after all these years.
Referring to an atom feed as an "RSS feed" is exactly equivalent to bringing Hydrox cookies to a potluck and hearing someone call them "Oreos".
An RSS reader that works with atom is the same as a VCR that will play VHS and Betamax cassettes out of the same physical slot, in a world where videocassettes are sold with no indication of which format they've been printed in, and they're all the same shape, and there are no VCRs that can fail to play either format.
> Or your blueray player that plays dvds and CDs....
Which, yes, is a lot like this, but absolutely nothing like VHS vs Betamax.