I sometimes wonder why there is so much push for "federation" and so few for... well just simple interoperable solutions that just require a client to connect to whatever server it wants with a well-known protocol.
Which is great for me as the end user - but makes it much harder for them to monetise.
Some sites even have different RSS links for subscribers only that give a full feed.
On the other hand, RSS definitely provides extra opportunities to monitise. Imagine your business provides a customisable "offers" feed so you can tell interested parties when a sale occurs, etc. Businesses should be falling over themselves to get that kind of engagement.
But for the company running the website, the fact that you're no longer browsing to their site, being served adverts and tracking code, and seeing what's on their homepage is not a benefit
Federation comes in mainly because push based systems require a server managing who follows who, what is posted, and who to notify of updates. That's a lot of information for one central service to be responsible for, leading some to think its better to federate and trust a bunch of servers to host copies of some or all of that same data.
Still I can't help but to wonder whether those notifications are needed or not. Except for instant messaging, I generally don't want notifications. Like I don't need to be told that a new podcast is available, I'll see it next time I open the app.
I would like to at least have the choice to use RSS instead of having to go through a complicated federated system.
Even if I'm using someone else's system, I just don't like the idea of giving them a reason/need to manage all that for me. RSS works fine 99% of the time.
Ideally the push-based parts would be optional for both ends so you could host a static feed and still have people see those updates in their fancy fediverse apps, just not immediately when you post them.
Instead we have a completely different standard without a simple core that you can easily implement if you don't need all the bells and whistles.
The people creating websites often don't know that they're providing RSS feeds though, and never link to it.
To solve that I developed a tool that finds RSS feeds, even if RSS autodiscovery isn't implemented: https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder
I would even say that a podcast that does not support RSS is not a podcast, it is something else.