It seems like you would want to support RSS, Atom, and ActivityPub to allow both news readers and newer things like Mastodon to work?
Maybe RSS could be dropped? Are there news readers that support RSS but not Atom?
Maybe RSS could be dropped? Are there news readers that support RSS but not Atom?
Unfortunately yes. Gnus has not gotten Atom support yet (people keep using external programs to translate). Also far too many feeds still output RSS instead of Atom. RSS is a horrible format and there is no reason today to use it instead of Atom.