[jakecopp]

Are there online RSS feed writers that nontechnical people could use? Reading a pure collection of my friend's RSS feeds would be wonderful.

Though to the best of my understanding there is no way of commenting on RSS posts unless you host a site.

[zdkl]

Have you checked out the ActivityPub spec? https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview

[brylie]

FWIW, Mastadon supports ActivityPub:

https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-and-the-w3c-f75f376f422

[fitzroy]

FriendFeed was great for this (until it was acquired and eventually shut down by Facebook).

Seems like a good time to resurrect that idea.

[brylie]

For non-technical people, it might be good to help them get set up on Mastadon network:

https://joinmastodon.org/

https://instances.social/

[aaron-lebo]

That's not a good choice for non technical people.

I respect what they are doing, but the community is still nerdy and really small. It will feel good from a techie perspective, but it's not something that many users are going to get much value out of, you are kind of wasting their time.

Not sure, but pretty sure Mastodon is going to end up being as popular as Diaspora RStatus or app.net. It's not a mainstream solution. Federation for most people is a useful feature on top of an active popular social network, not the other way around.

[daveFNbuck]

Yes, I find Feedly to be quite usable. It also has some social features but I have no idea how those work.

[dawnerd]

Newsblur? Theres commenting and it's pretty easy to use.

[smsm42]

If you want to read RSS, use feedly. I've moved to it when Google killed Reader, and haven't regretted it since.