>RSS - People put out RSS feeds. People subscribe to RSS feeds. RSS might replace Twitter for your particular use case. However, it doesn't replace Twitter in

>RSS - People put out RSS feeds. People subscribe to RSS feeds. RSS might replace Twitter for your particular use case. However, it doesn't replace Twitter in general case for the public because RSS is one-directional. The phenomenon of the "Twittersphere" includes bi-directional activity like replies and retweets. As an analogy, this Hacker News site has users taking part in reading and writing activities. A few users like to spread the word that they consume HN via RSS just fine (e.g. maybe get feeds from https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/). But users (who are not just pure lurkers) can't use RSS to upvote/downvote comments or post their own replies. Therefore, RSS can't replace HN's website for general usage. Likewise, RSS can be a way of consuming NYTimes newspaper, but RSS can't replace the NYTimes itself. RSS is an undeniable convenience for readers but its limited scope does not provide viral mechanics and feedback loops for writers publishers. RSS works at the abstraction level of "protocol for data download". Sites like Twitter and HN, etc work at abstraction level of "virtual marketplace of ideas" -- and that function is out of scope for RSS. So whatever can replace Twitter will look like something closer to Twitter than RSS. EDIT reply to: >That's a client side question, IMHO. If you want your client to show you replies, I was talking about the RSS-user-themselves wanting the capability to _write_ the replies and not reading others' replies. RSS is not a read+WRITE protocol. It's a pull-based reading protocol.